Made it

The Associated Press has an article in The New York Times about the end of a long flight:

Two pilots in a helium-filled balloon landed safely off the coast of Mexico early Saturday, after a nearly seven-thousand-mile trip across the Pacific Ocean that shattered two longstanding records for ballooning.
The pilots landed four miles off Baja California, about three hundred miles north of a popular destination, Cabo San Lucas, greeted by a team of balloon enthusiasts who assisted with the landing. The pilots, Troy Bradley of Albuquerque, New Mexico and Leonid Tiukhtyaev of Russia, came in low and dropped thick trailing ropes into the ocean to help slow the balloon, before setting down in a controlled water landing. The balloon was to be towed to the coast (photo).
Mission control in Albuquerque was packed with members of the pilots’ team, Two Eagles, and the pilots’ families. All eyes were focused on a giant screen showing a map of the coast and the balloon’s location. “We’re really pleased with the distance numbers we have here and very pleased with the duration numbers,” said Steve Shope, the mission control director. “These are significant improvements over the existing records. We didn’t break them by just a little bit. They were broken by a significant amount.”
Bradley and Tiukhtyaev lifted off from Japan on Sunday morning, and on Friday they beat the “holy grail” of ballooning achievements: the 137-hour duration record set in 1978 by the Double Eagle II crew of Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman in the first balloon flight across the Atlantic. They also easily exceeded the distance record of 5,209 miles set by the Double Eagle V team during the first trans-Pacific flight in 1981. By Saturday morning, Bradley and Tiukhtyaev had traveled 6,646 miles over six days, sixteen hours, and thirty-seven minutes, or more than 160 hours.
The pilots were said to be in good spirits at various times during the trip, but it was a grueling ordeal. The balloon’s capsule is about the size of a large tent: seven feet long, five feet wide, and tive feet tall. They were flying at an altitude of at least fifteen thousand feet, requiring them to wear oxygen masks and bundle up against the fifty-degree temperature inside the capsule. They had sleeping bags, a small onboard heater, and a simple toilet.
The original route took the pilots on a path from Japan, across the Pacific Ocean and toward the Pacific Northwest, before they encountered shifting weather patterns. They then made a sweeping right turn and headed south along the California coast for the Mexico landing.

Rico says it's yet another adventure he's glad someone else had...