If you’d like to take a ride on the Goodyear blimp, it turns out you can’t do it wearing heels.
This I learned on Day 2 of Coachella, when the people who promote the tire company’s famous dirigible — they have a nice lady in charge of the blimp’s socials and everything — invited me and my colleagues Rebecca Castillo and Kayla Bartkowski to climb on board for a little cruise over the desert festival.
Before we could get on to the airship that had room for about six to eight people, we had to watch a safety video in which the narrator told us that you can’t wear heels on the blimp — but that if you’d worn them today, you could check with a Goodyear representative and they’d see about other arrangements. (One rep told me she’d already loaned out her sneakers several times Saturday.)
Anyway!
Los Angeles Times reporter Mikael Wood rides the Goodyear blimp flying over Coachella
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
The ride was gentler than I’d anticipated — kind of like a boat ride in a harbor. We took off from a giant dirt field at the Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport in Thermal and tooled around for 30 minutes or so; when we got over Coachella, we could see a few hundred Beliebers camped out as close to the main stage as they could get — nine or 10 hours before Bieber’s performance was scheduled to begin.
They looked so little down there — so small in size, so big in Beliebf.
Back on the ground, we had to get off the blimp two by two, each duo replaced by a new pair of folks who’d responded to an email asking if they might want to a ride on a humongous floating billboard.
The ladies who replaced Rebecca and Kayla looked super jazzed; my guy seemed less impressed.
Maybe he’d blimped before.