Thursday January 1st 2026

This post is being posted on January 3rd and back dated to the 1st. Sleep got in my way on New Years day.

Happy New Year

My New Years day focused on a tradition I’ve had since childhood. Watching the Tournament of Roses Parade has been a requirement. In the early 60s my parents took me to some of their friends with a color TV to watch the parade in “living color”. This was quite an event that lasted several years until we had a color TV of our own.

In the mid 1990s I took a tour to the Los Angeles area to see the parade. A lot of it was a disappointment. The hotel was on the other side of the county. We had to leave around 4:30AM to get to the parade route before 6:30 or 7AM when they shut the streets down. The bleacher seating was crowded cold aluminum that you were pretty much stuck in for a couple of hours before the parade even started. Then you got to watch two plus hours of parade from a viewing location inferior to the TV view by far. The seats were probably one hundred feet from the actual floats.

The best part of the parade tour was viewing the floats parked after the parade. You can get up close enough to see the actual flowers and mechanics of the floats. A few years after my tour experience I was back in the LA area. This time I only went to see the floats being decorated and the post parade viewing. I watched the actual parade on TV from my hotel room. This was the best of both types of viewing.

Watching this years parade on TV I felt bad for all the spectators. Waiting for and watching the parade in the rain must have been terrible. It was just cold the year I sat in the grandstands.