Rose Bowl Parade

Happy New Year to everyone. This morning after watching the parade on tv, we gathered up the stroller and cameras and walked up the road to where the Rose Parade ended (yeah, it seriously ends just up the road from our place, which is pretty cool).

We found a loop-hole in security through the park fencing and were able to walk amongst the incoming floats and horses, take a handful of pictures, and listen to the last hurrah of the bands and floats as the parade came to an end. We even saw the characters from the Star Wars floats hanging out just next to us and one of the storm troopers in the first-aid booth.

All these years the floats looked pretty on tv, but they really were gorgeous in person. And the incredible smell of so many flowers was lovely (which you can't get from seeing them on tv).

This shows some of the incredible detail. Every inch was covered in some natural kind of leaf, petal, seed, you name it!

Couldn't resist taking some pictures of the underwater themed float from the "City of St. Louis!"

Later we found out that the security, etc. had assumed that we had local resident passes (which we actually didn't because our actual street wasn't blocked off) and so we freely had the chance to mingle before baracades and such were put along the edges of the floats for when the general paying public was admitted for viewing. Pretty neat stuff.