Way to Go : Empire Balloon, Wine and Polo Festival Is All That and Cars, Biplanes and More

About the only forms of transportation you couldn’t find at the Empire Balloon, Wine and Polo Festival earlier last month had to do with water. But then, the festival was in Indio, where you might think the largest body of anything liquid would be a Dixie cup holding a date shake.

But if it had wheels, wings, hoofs or hot air, it was either on display or on the move during the annual three-day event.

One of the main focuses of the weekend has traditionally been a series of polo matches at the 165-acre Empire Polo Club and Equestrian Park, which is the host of the festival. Indio has the largest polo facilities in Southern California, and male and female players from all over the world come to play on the fields.

This year, however, a new wrinkle to the game was added with the scheduling of several polocrosse matches. Polocrosse, first played in Australia, is a kind of mounted lacrosse. Each team consists of three players, who use racquets with nets to pass the ball back and forth down the field (which, at 160 by 60 yards, is considerably smaller than a regulation polo field). Many of the best polocrosse players in the United States competed at the festival, as did an international team composed of players from Australia, New Zealand and Zimbabwe.

A pair of traditional polo matches also showcased the talents of eight female players that polo instructor Kathy Batchelor said are among the highest-rated female players in the game today.

Batchelor, who manages the Playa Grande Polo Club in Huntington Beach, said the matches were preliminaries for the women’s United States Open polo tournament. The United States Polo Assn., the governing body for the sport in the United States, makes no distinctions between male and female players, said Batchelor, ranking athletes on ability rather than sex.

The festival, she said, often attracts spectators who have no idea how the game is played but who often come away fired with enthusiasm afterward.

“Oh yeah, we get a lot of people who get interested,” said Batchelor. “There’s a lot of advertising for the sport that comes from (the festival). People come out and see it and decide they might like to try it.”

Most newcomers to the sport, however, begin by playing a scaled-down version of the game called arena polo.

For those whose tastes ran less to horses than to horsepower, the festival’s concours d’elegance trotted out everything from early horseless carriages to street rods and muscle cars. The star attractions were a 1903 Haynes Apperson, a 1907 Franklin and a 1911 Baker--all one-of-a-kind--and the only 1914 Stutz Bearcat on public display.

The winged part of the weekend began with demonstrations of remote-control miniature gliders and graduated to precision-flying biplanes (whose pilots that are known as “The Dawn Patrol”). The planes were older than many of the cars, but not by much: the pilots flew pre-World War II PT-17 Stearmans and Waco YPF-7 aircraft, popular barnstormers during the 1930s.

Easily the most visible part of the weekend, however, were the handful of balloon events. One Friday evening was the “balloon glow”: Just after dark, a dozen balloons, their baskets resting on the grass of the polo fields, would periodically fill their huge canopies with brilliant light produced by their gas burners.

The individual balloon here or there is a common sight over Indio, but the festival provided a number of opportunities for locals as well as tourists to get an eyeful of them en masse. In addition to demonstration flights, there were competitions for the balloon armada on Saturday and Sunday, bringing the Coachella Valley sky alive with color.

Greg Szymanski, a balloonist from Long Beach and safety officer for the Southern California Balloon Assn., piloted one of the 58 balloons that competed in a pair of contests that tested pilots’ accuracy and skill. For one task, Szymanski said, the balloonists retreated to a distance from the polo fields, inflated their balloons and flew back, the object being to drop a four-ounce beanbag on an X marked on one of the polo fields.

Even the demonstration flights contained an element of competition, however impromptu.

“Even though it’s a demonstration flight, we usually get a competition of our own going,” he said. “We might get a champagne cork and get bets going on who can throw it into Joe’s basket, something like that. We do it because we just enjoy the competitive aspect.”

Back on Earth, spectators from around the Southland lazed in the late fall desert sun and enjoyed the liquid part of the Balloon, Wine and Polo festival. Tastings were offered by several wineries from the Southern California wine-growing region of Temecula.