Here in the midwest there is an annual balloonfest. Almost all the flights occur around dawn and then late afternoon. It's a weather/wind thing.
I went on a just after dawn flight a few years ago. It was just barely light when we started unfolding the canopy and setting up the basket. We flew for about an hour. There was the dull roar of the burners, the absolute silence that followed, and the light whip of the occasional breeze. One of the things that surprised me was how well we could hear the ground, like a group of kids yelling up and waving.
But mostly the silence was broken by contacts with the chase team, the folks with the cargo van that had carried the balloon rig to the launch point and the SUV with three other people in it, that followed them. Near the end of the flight there was a constant back and forth on radios of
"The next crossroad will get us into the target field."
"Nope, we're gonna overshoot that one, meet me on the other side of the tree line."
A skilled combination of pulling the overhead lines to vent hot air, and tapping the gas -- you tap, a moment passes, and the balloon responds, put us within twenty five feet of the target point, an imagined spot in a farmer's backyard.
And then we've dropped the lines and people are shouting "Pull us in! Everybody on a line! Don't let us drift into the trees/barn/pond whatever."
More venting, and the chase crew keeps us in place while we lower to the ground.
There's this excitement and exuberance that manages to last even through the having to clean it up and stow it all away, and get out of the farmer's yard.
"Chasing" is fun, too. Especially with longer flights. Combinations of road atlases, county maps, GPS and cell phone Google mapping (because it's a puzzle in a maze and you aren't going to trust just one source.) And all of that coming down to the last, maybe two minutes where you have to discover, exactly where is the landing site going to be, can we get into there (sure, from the sky you can just drop in -- that doesn't help the road crew get past the gates, fences, and ravines), then how fast can you get out of the truck, get weight on the lines and bring these guys down safely.