Kanab, UT: Love at First Flight

Valentines Day, 2025: Kanab, Utah. We braved the wintry weather for its annual hot air balloon festival, Balloons and Tunes.

We had a travel buddy in Connor, our 3-year-old grandson, who had never seen balloons before. For Connor, and therefore also for us, it truly was “Love at First Flight.”

Being from Phoenix, it was also “Love at First Touch” for Connor (and Finn), who had never seen snow before, either. We got three inches, though it all melted within a day.

The free-to-attend event includes a lantern launch, main street glow, live local music, and three mornings of potential launches. Ballooning is extremely weather-dependent, and this snowstorm and its resultant dismal, foggy weather kept the balloons grounded for 2 out of 3 days. Booo!

Some of the pilots graciously inflated their balloons for us anyway, even though they wouldn’t lift off. This gave us the chance to get up-close-and-personal with them. Connor watched some (older) kids climb into the basket and was sure we were going to toss him in and let him float away, but he liked touching the basket anyway.

Many RV’ers seek out Albuquerque’s huge balloon festival, held each year in October and the largest in the world. For us, it’s just too darn big. We like the lil’ guys, where it’s easy to get around and you can get super up-close-and-personal with the balloons and their owners … hear the roar … feel the flames!

The Main Street Glow is a night-time fave, where balloons are illuminated all along the main drag through town. Again, your access is virtually unfettered at this small-town, uncrowded gathering.

Again, getting close to the balloonists (ballooners? balloon people?) is the biggest thrill. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming.

During the day, a vendor fair and ongoing live music entertain festival-goers. But who cares about music when there are potatoes-on-a-stick larger than your head?

A previous visit to Kanab in 2022 (during warmer weather) found us zooming around Coral Pink Sand Dunes in a rented ATV, visiting “Little Hollywood” where hundreds of western films were made, and hiking amongst the toadstool hoodoos and slot canyons of southern Utah.

For this trip, we returned to Best Friends, an enormous 6,000-acre animal sanctuary, at which you can visit, tour, volunteer, and even camp in your RV. This time, we toured the 101-resident Bunny House, where friendly and fuzzy rabbits cozied up to Connor, and thankfully did not mistake his itty bitty fingers for baby carrots.

We also visited Moqui Cave, a self-proclaimed tourist attraction if ever there was one, but the history nerds in us loved the old geode-lined bar where the likes of John Wayne cozied up during the filming of hundreds of Western movies in this area, back in the day. Connor tried to order a whiskey but had forgotten his ID, so he had to settle for dinosaur footprints and Indian images painted in glow-in-the-dark neon paint.

The final day of the festival dawned clear and cold, perfect conditions for liftoff. The balloons soared over the red rock cliffs of Kanab, and in fact right over our RV campground. There are a few RV parks to choose from in Kanab, but we greatly prefer J&J RV Park, a tidy campground which is conveniently located right across the street from the launch field.

Many people were astonished that we would take a 3-year-old on a five-day RV trip, but this is actually Connor’s 3rd RV adventure! He now knows all the steps to dumping the RV sewer tank, in order, and can do all of them without prompting. Why else do we have kids and grandkids, if not for them to do our dirty work? And, this time he emptied his piggy bank and filled the RV tank for us. What a kid!

This wasn’t our first balloonathon. Another favorite (click to read): Lake Havasu (Arizona) Balloon Festival, held each year in January. It’s another small gathering where you can RV camp super-close to the action!

One of our photos from Havasu even made it on the cover of RV Destinations Magazine, an awesome resource for RV trip inspiration and planning!

Next year’s Balloons and Tunes will be February 20-22, 2026. As we pulled away, our hearts “soared” at the memories of all the fun times we had here!

Our next trip in March will include our 44th National Park: Channel Islands, off the coast of California. Then, our standard 3.5-month summer trip commences in late April, taking us primarily through Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Minnesota. So many charming destinations out there … so little time!