General Parking Balloon Fiesta

Covid 19 testing. I had. 1pm appointment. It is now 2 pm and I probably have 2 more hours to go.

We arrived at 4 and there was no problem parking, plenty of spots.nNot sure why the price was so high! $15!!nAnd we left at 10ish AM , so there was no traffic leaving either.

This review is from someone that attended Fiesta from 1988 to 1998, 2003, 2013, and 2015+.nnThe event it's self is amazing, I highly recommend watching on TV or from the thousands of locations outside of the park. If you do go to the park I'd recommend park and ride (online only which has solved a lot of the issues) and catching the very first rides into the park.nnThis whole Fiesta, other than park and ride, is a fiasco! What is the point of paying $15 to go and park your car? They have literally 2 lanes entering the park coming from tramway/Roy. To top that off the traffic coming from Alameda join into those 2 lanes, so now you just bottle neck everything!nnOh wait it gets better when leaving the park they have you leaving with 2 lanes(used to be 4) but no! That is a lie as you get closer to the frontage road it all bottle necks down to 1 lane (let me remind you it used to be 4 lanes bottle necking to 2 on the frontage road)! Oh but it gets even better once on the frontage road it stays 2 lanes until you are almost to I25 studios. Hey but at that point it should have just stayed 1 because you get everyone cramming to move right to just move back to the left lane to get on I25 once passed the Alameda stop light.nnOh but you are thinking, 'oh its ok, they have a lot of awesome police officers directing traffic' (btw the officers are great except for the ones directing traffic out to a lane just to be told that they have to make a u-turn by the officers 1 street up because that lane doesn't exist because traffic is flowing in both directions, and instead of moving just 1 cone to let you in to merge with the traffic leaving, they move 5 cones and say that they don't want to bother with traffic merging, so why not work with the officers down at the field where traffic starts to tell them that that lane doesn't exist back to what I was saying)! Yay we have a lot of officers for directing traffic...nope just 4 officers at every intersection standing around. Great!nnEven better when entering the park from the frontage road giant signs say 'traffic use 2 turning lanes' with well illustrated pictures. Then when I use the second lane I almost get t-boned because some SUV doesn't want to stay in the right (first lane).nnMy family is done with Balloon Fiesta and we won't be saying anything good about it. If you want to see Balloon Fiesta, do it from the TV or go to Rio Rancho, or the millions of other places to see the balloons, because the park officials don't care about the visitors, they only care about the money!

Good organization of the staff and easy parking

During the balloon Fiesta, parking was very organized and getting in and out was simple.