The "Bacon, Brews and Balloons" event last weekend in Redmond featured numerous hot air balloons lit up for evening viewing.

Crowds at Sam Johnson Park ballooned in size on Saturday for “Bacon, Brews & Balloons,” the Redmond-based celebration of the multi-day Balloon’s Over Bend event.

The event featured attractions for all ages: food, drinks, live music, bouncy houses and — of course — a balloon show.

A line of food trucks had stationed themselves near the park’s entrance — each with a special menu item containing bacon and a sizable line of people waiting to order. Another trail of people showed the way to the event’s drink tent, where local breweries including Cascade Lakes, Kobold and Bend Cider Co. boasted an array of different beers and ciders.

In another section, kids scrambled around in bouncy houses while their parents waited outside. Still other people had camped out on picnic blankets and camping chairs to watch local band Honey Don’t perform some tunes and others sat in the grass, away from the more crowded areas.

A woman tabling at a tent for the Bend-based The Joint Chiropractic said she’d been worried when only a small crowd had shown up at 5 p.m., but that fear  dissipated as the night wore on and more groups began to trickle in.

By 8:30 p.m., the crowd had begun to migrate away from the tents and carts — toward the section of Sam Johnson Park that had been sectioned off for the hot air balloons.

It took until a little after 9 p.m. for the balloon inflation to begin.

“When we’re just inflating the balloons and standing them on the ground, it’s a very wind sensitive thing,” said Darren Kling, owner of Big Sky Balloon Company, which provided three balloons for the event. “Oftentimes, we’re just waiting for the winds to get calm enough in order for us to inflate the balloons, stand them up.”

But Kling and his team did eventually get started, cheered on by the crowd of event-goers who now circled the balloon inflation site.

The first balloon — Kling’s RE/MAX balloon — took its time inflating. But then it was up with jets of flame shooting into it intermittently, and then the next one was up with flames, followed by a third.

And as people began to trickle out, the balloons towered over them, glowing in the park before lifting up, up and away.