NATCHEZ — Ann Kirby is perfectly comfortable on the ground.

But she’s at peace 800 feet in the air.

The pilot of the Morning Kiss balloon from Houston, Kirby is in Natchez for the Great Mississippi River Balloon Race, and Saturday evening she happily fielded questions from inside her balloon basket at the balloon race festival site while occasionally lighting up — and heating up — the area around her with bursts from her burner.

Like the other pilots, Kirby has been grounded this weekend by uncooperative wind and fog, but she said she’s had good flights in Natchez before and hopes to be able to take to the skies this morning.

“There’s something about a balloon — I took lessons for a single-engine aircraft, and that’s noisy, but with a balloon it is so quiet and it really makes you feel at peace,” she said.

A pilot since 2001, Kirby got her start with hot-air balloons in 1997 when she was a member of the crew for a balloonist named Phil Bryant — no relation to the Mississippi governor. Before she was on the balloon crew, Kirby had never flown in one.

That experience was all it took to get her hooked on the idea of her own balloon.

“Most pilots get their start crewing first,” she said. “But we have this saying, “Spend $5 on one ride, and your next one will cost $30,000.”

Kirby’s expensive follow-up ride — though it wasn’t really her second — is 80-feet tall, including the basket, and has 77,000 cubic feet of air inside the multi-colored panel envelope, the balloon part of a hot-air balloon. She spends approximately 35 hours a year in it and flies in between six and eight festivals annually.

Seeing the country from what she terms as “the perspective of the birds” has helped Kirby appreciate the expanse of America’s purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain — among other things.

“From up there you can see the size of the lakes, where the rivers go, you see the valleys; it is a really interesting perspective,” she said. “You also see just how many houses have swimming pools.”

And while human spectators aren’t unusual, they’re far from the only ones who take notice when Kirby is in the air.

“The dogs really don’t like us; we can be at 1,000 feet and the dogs will bark at us,” she said.

“Livestock will stand there and turn their head watching us, and then we hit the burner and — boom — they take off running.”

But despite the protestations of some of the occupants of the terra firma below, Kirby doesn’t plan to give up the air any time soon.

“It doesn’t take long, you start flying these balloons, and you kind of start falling in love with them,” she said.