word-request
The question about hot-air balloons* got me thinking: What do you call their type of movement in English? In German it is not "fliegen" (flying) but "fahren" (shipping, possibly driving). What is it in English?
*: Balloons which are unpowered, without engines or propellers; they can only move up and down due to buoyancy changes (lifted by helium/hydrogen/hot air) and are otherwise at the mercy of the wind.
Preface ADDED 14 Jan/Jan 14, 00:11 GMT/UTC: This answer, as the OP Lucian Sava is well aware, has been written from an AmE perspective. Actually, it is written from the perspective of the variety of AmE that I speak. I think Lucian gets by now that English usage is not universal, as I had already indicted in my anwer. Let the conversation continue, by all means!
Serpentine is fine, but in English I am pretty sure we would use it as an adjective describing the road. Such a road is also called, in familiar terms, a curvy mountain road. More technically, it is any road that contains many switchbacks or hairpin curves
Switchback can refer to entirety of such a road. But this may not reflect universal usage.
I think serpentine (adjective) would be the more universally recognized word.
You can do an image search for both "switchback road" and "serpentine road" and get many of the same images.
Thus saith the snake:
I call them "front steps". I live in Seattle.
My grandparents from Chicago would have called them a "front stoop".
My impression is that they are called a "stoop" in areas where row houses are common in big cities. This might be a coincidence: Etymonline says that this meaning of the word "stoop" is derived from Dutch. New York City was originally settled by the Dutch, and is at the center of the North American "areas where row houses are common in big cities."
Best Answer
There are a number of words you can choose here.
In the active sense, i.e. when the balloon is being directed, avoid the word drive, and prefer instead either the word pilot, fly or navigate: