Flower Power

laura fong
Jan 4, 2017
3 min read

A fresh start to 2017.

The Rose Parade is such a bright way to start the new year and the theme is always so inspiring. This year was Echoes of Success. I have to give a shout out to my hometown of Torrance for flipping the script and having a female knight ready to kick some dragon butt!

My other favorite float was the surfing dogs because I love, love, love dogs! It was so cute! I seriously couldn't contain myself watching the dogs "hang ten!"

To kickoff Double Click this year, my co-host, Anna Campa, and I did an episode on the floral masterpieces. You can watch the full episode below! For this shoot, I wanted a colorful look, even though I knew I might clash with the floats but I think it worked!

(Scroll down to keep reading about the Rose Parade float viewing | keep scrolling for more pictures | scroll to the end for details on my outfit and for the Double Click episode)

Anyway, so you know the Rose Parade is on TV every year... and once that ends they park the floats in Pasadena and people can see them up close and personal... well not that close, there were barriers! So hands off people! Haha. It costs $13 to get in, which isn't that bad since most of the floats were "on" and the surfing dogs even had show times!

The place was packed! Keep scrolling through the pictures and you'll see I got photobombed! Haha. With all those people you're bond to have a memorable one! For us, it was a man named Marcus (I think that was his name) and he was on the Trader Joe's float this year! I'm sure he had no idea who we were, he just saw the CBS microphone and jumped to the conclusion that we were important. I'm not really sure what happened... but he was really nice and really excited to meet us and for some reason he had us take a picture of him only with the float... on our camera!! Random.

Floats

Anyways, back to the floats. There were some super cool ones this year, like the Downey roller coaster. Oh man, that thing could move! When the cart turned the corner the whole thing would shake! I wish they sold tickets to ride it! One float I wanted to see in action was the Farmer's RV. When I saw that RV lid lift, I was floored! In all fairness, I was fast forwarding through the parade, so it looked way cooler that way. And the surfing dogs float! There really is no way for me to express how much my heart melted every time the dogs surfed! Except one of the dogs posing for pictures... he didn't look happy :( He was wearing sunglasses... it was adorable... but he looked like a hung over A-lister who didn't want to be there! Now we need to talk about the Torrance float more! It was designed by a high school senior, who played the knight... she didn't go to the same school as me, she went to the one all with all the smart kids! Haha, The float was about defeating "your dragons" meaning overcoming obstacles.

I wanted to pick an obstacle to take on this year but I couldn't come up with a non-cheesy one like not procrastinating, working out more, or putting life and family before work. But I have a funny story to go with procrastinating. One of my best friends is named Min and she simply gets things done. For instance, one summer she saw me scrapbooking, said, "I want to scrapbook," went to buy supplies, and before bed that night she had a scrapbook! Meanwhile, it's 6 years later and I'm still working on the one she saw me making!! So a friend and I coined the term, "Min-tality," Min's mentality. Instead of telling myself to stop putting things off, I keep telling myself to have more "Min-tality!"

Let's all have a little more "Min-tality" this year <3