Rose Bowl Road Trip: Post 5

Day 6: Today was the day we looked forward to. The big game. We arrived in Pasadena before sunrise. There was already a mass of people parking in the lots around the stadium as we arrived. This was an intense scene where we saw people polarized in their maroon and opposing orange. We walked ourselves over to the grandstands for the Tournament of the Roses Parade. It was nuts seeing people who had slept on the street for as much as a couple days before the parade to make sure they got the best seats. The parade was a slight disappointment, although the floats were out of this world complex. Check out this Germany tribute...
After the parade ended, we returned to the stadium park. There we grabbed some food, changed into wonderfully warm weather clothes, as it was in the 70s. What a glorious piece of weather we had. We got a chance to interact with a lot of different people outside the stadium before stepping into The Rose Bowl itself. What a antastic piece of history that stadium is. It is absolutely incredible inside. You see palm trees from the inside peeking over the edge and it has a neat shape to it. However, it is no Memorial Stadium...:)
Once in the stadium, we got a chance to see the place fill up and had orange poms on our seats from the U of I alumni association. Our seats were near the Illinois end zone, and were actually pretty fantastic. Well, the game went uhhhh, uhhh, well, Rashard Mendenhall had an awesome game, and now he's projected to be a top 15 pick int he NFL draft. That was nice.
OK, the game was a blowout. USC destroyed Illinois, but it was a lot of fun to be there still. Once we left the stadium, we avoided some of the more obnoxious USC fans and hightailed it out of town. We ate at In and Out Burger and ran off to Kingman, AZ, where we stayed at my buddy Chuck's house. His parents were fantastic in letting us stay and I still thank them so much.