How do you ring in the New Year? Wait, I don’t want to know. I meant what do you do on New Year’s Day? Sit around with friends and family, recover from the holidays and watch football? Me too!
There’s a tradition in my family to watch the Rose Parade and then the mass amounts of football. When I was younger (sorry, all these cool childhood memories have come up lately, and I share them all), we lived about 5 blocks from the Rose Parade route in Pasadena, California, and my mom happened to work for a company that had a giant float. Each year we would go down to the warehouses where they decorate the floats and get a sneak preview of the floats and help glue flowers all over them. Quite a sight to see. It is an open to the public event.
The floats have come a long way from the good ole days, and now feature robot-like animatronics, special effects, live acts and humungous floral displays that seem only likely in dreams.
Even if you’re not a big fan of parades, this year, if you are a fan of dogs, you need to watch! As a follow up to last year’s extremely popular skateboarding dogs float, the 2010 Rose Parade will feature a really unique float complete with snowboarding dogs. The creators of the Natural Balance Pet Foods float figured they did skateboarding last year, and surfing dogs have been seen, why not snowboarding dogs to make the audience oooh and aaah!?
The float dogs were chosen through a casting call in November put on by Tillman, the company’s bulldog mascot and world record holder for the fastest skateboarding bulldog. In addition to Tillman, four “chosen” dogs Rose, Lyle, Niko and Tank…all English bulldogs will shred the slopes of the float on January 1st. Bulldogs seem to be the most talented breed when it comes to skateboarding and now, snowboarding.
Not only will the super-talented dogs be a first, the giant “snowy” ski slope float will be the longest float to ever grace the Rose Parade, at 112 feet long. Even the Guinness World Record crew will be on hand for the event!
Here's the conceptual sketch of the 2010 Natural Balance Pet Food Float:
Check out this video about the dog training and making of the fancy float:
Jan 4, 2010 at 2:11 PM Did you see it? The snowboarding dogs float looked awesome in the New Year's Day Rose Parade! It seems that it all went according to plan...the dogs slid down the slope over and over along the parade route. And, Guinness World Records declared the float as the longest single-axle float in the world! Way to go dogs!