Happy New Year from the West Coast. We got up at 5:30 this morning so that we could get ready to go view the parade floats getting decorated for the Rose Parade. We have complimentary breakfast each morning as part of the tour. From there we headed down to the first of the decoration sites. We saw six of the floats from the designer that has won an award for his floats for the last 12 years. The first thing I noticed when we entered the tent was the smell of flowers. It was just like walking into a florist shop. Each float starts as an artistic sketch. From the sketch the metal workers create the shell of the float on top of a truck chassis. Foam is injected into the shell and then painted the color the final float is going to look like. From there flowers, seeds, and grass are added one piece at a time to the float. It looks like a pains taking process and it’s pretty amazing that so many floats are created from scratch each year for the parade. We went to see a couple of more float making sites near the Rose Bowl next. Unfortunately it started raining and we got pretty drenched.

We were scheduled to go to Band Fest next, but we decided to sit that out since it was raining so much. Instead we went searched for a battery charger for our camera. I forgot our battery charger at home and the batter light came on while we were looking at the floats. We had the driver at the hotel drive us to Best Buy and we found a charger there.

In the evening we headed to the Civic Center next to the hotel for our New Years Eve bash. We had dinner, drinks and danced until midnight. We counted down the last seconds of 2005 and toasted campaign while confetti floated down from the ceiling. I wish everyone a great 2006. We miss the kids and hope to be home soon.