For their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Marek, who was fifty-two, booked a hot-air balloon ride at sunset for himself and his wife Clara, who was fifty. The pilot, Mr. Roca, took them up from a field near town at five o'clock, and the town shrank to a handful of toy houses. Marek had planned everything down to the last detail; Clara had only said that she would believe in balloons when she saw one.
Half an hour later the wind changed. "Hmm," said Mr. Roca, which is not a word a passenger wants to hear from a pilot. The balloon drifted for an hour over the hills and landed, with a bump, among the vines of a distant valley, in the middle of a harvest festival. There were long tables, lanterns and an accordion band playing a polka.
The farmers ran over, cheering. They thought Marek and Clara were the surprise act, which, in a way, they were. They gave Clara a basket, Marek a hat and a bunch of grapes, and pushed them toward a big wooden barrel: "Stomp!" Mr. Roca stayed with the balloon to phone his truck. "Go, go!" he said.
Clara took off her shoes. They stomped grapes with purple feet, the juice cool and sticky between their toes, and then they ate and danced a polka that neither of them knew, until their feet hurt. At midnight a farmer's tractor took them, purple to the knees, to Mr. Roca's truck on the road. In the trailer, looking at the stars, Marek said, "The best wrong turn of our lives."
