I traveled to Los Angeles over the New Year's holiday weekend, for a bucket list trip to attend the Rose Bowl and Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena. With the Iowa Hawkeyes playing (Standford) in the bowl game, I figured I wouldn't have a better chance to go, along with 30,000 or so other Iowans (some of whom I knew and bumped into there).
My observations, in chronological order:
* The Santa Monica Pier, and surrounding city and beach, was a great place for us Midwestern tourists to gather. Seeing the sunset over a beach on New Year's Eve isn't normal, but I could get used to it.
* Pasadena is a tree-filled, skyscraper-less suburb that could pass for a thousand other college towns anywhere in the America. (Cal-Tech is at its center.)
* The parade exceeded my expectations. The route is 5.5 miles long, so it isn't that hard to find a spot to watch as long as you aren't near the start. Standing among the locals around the parade mid-point was perfect. The colors, the music, the floats, the celebrities -- it was all very cool, and the two hours went by very fast.
* If you go to the parade, and then the game, there isn't a lot of transition time between the two. Driving or shuttling to the game was almost impossible with the traffic, so most parade attendees made the 2+ miles walk. Couple that with extremely tight security at the stadium gates, and it takes a while to get to your seat.
* The Rose Bowl Stadium experience was second-to-none. Not sure there is any other 100,000-seat stadium in the world in such a park-like setting. Factor in that I'd seen it on TV dozens of times on New Year's Day, but always in the cold and dark of an Iowa winter, when it looked like it was on another planet. The game outcome may have been awful for Iowa football fans, but at least the Stanford band was entertaining.
* So many freeways, so many cars in LA. And this was a holiday weekend. Let's just say that Google maps and traffic came in very handy.
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