My World Tuesday #11

One of the big things happening right now is preparation for New Years which means the big Rose Bowl game between USC (yea Trojans!) and Penn State, and the Tournament of Roses Parade. Both events take place in Pasadena, California, which is one of the cities in Los Angeles County and just a stone's throw from downtown Los Angeles.

This is a picture from the parking lot of The Rose Bowl where from now until New Year's Day they are working on many of the floats for the parade. Then on January 1st at 2:00 p.m. the game will take place. Every 1st Sunday the Rose Bowl is host to a huge swap meet.


This was my first time going to preview the floats as they were being decorated. I had a great time and came "this close" to volunteering. I found it interesting how they begin, first with the drawing and design....


Next they'll make a scale model. The top of the metal frame indicates the height of the freeway underpass. Anything above that point is created to lower so that it can make it under the freeway. So, the giraffe in the model pictured below will actually drop backwards until it lays flat.


Next they create the base and then rely on the volunteer work of both young and old to work like the dickens to help decorate these beautiful creations. I posted a lot of pics so this is fairly lengthy but considering that I took 400 pics I did pretty good narrowing them down to just this (smile).










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Don't Rain On My Parade

I've always love the Tournament of Roses Parade. Having lived around Los Angeles my whole life the Rose Parade is just one of those things that's been an annual thing I looked forward to every New Year's morning. Every year you hope it doesn't rain on the parade but there has only been one time that it actually rained on the parade.

Here are just a couple of my favorite shots that I was able to recover from a computer that crashed on me. I thought I'd lost all my photos and to this day thank God that they were recovered.




In the photo above you can tell how big this is if you look at the bottom of the picture find the two green seats where someone sat during the parade.