After 25 hours of wondering at every turn whether we’d make it to our final destination, we finally made it to our destination!

I must say that Delta Airlines treated us very very well, and each flight, the one from Fargo to Minneapolis, as well as the one from Minneapolis to LAX were smooth as glass and arrived ahead of schedule.

Let me just try to express what a joy it is to leave the sub zero frigid, frozen plains, and a mere 5 hours later walk out into an 80 degree bright sunny day! But no, this picture is truly worth a thousand words….

We caught a shuttle from the airport to a small but very friendly car rental agency who held our car through our delay, and didn’t even charge us for the day we missed!

With the help of our iPhone GPS, we drove to the Pasadena area, and right to our cozy and fabulous AirBnB home for the week.  Our hosts left perfect instructions for how to get in, how to access the Internet, down to how to work the television.

But we were starving, having not eaten all day.  We drove up 3/4 of the length of Colorado Boulevard just taking in the sights, and getting the lay of the land. We then doubled back settling on a mexican cocina called Senior Fish, that had a lovely deck allowing us to enjoy our tacos al pastor and beer in the glorious afternoon sun.

We then took advantage of the fact that we didn’t have to worry about whether or not we’d miss a connection, or fail to arrive, and caught up on our emails.  We checked in with our hosts, letting them know we’d arrived, and also with Beverly at Fiesta Parade Floats, to see what time our shift would begin. Beverly told us not to arrive before 9am, as that’s when the designers get there, and there’s a lot of waiting around.

We then found the Trader Joe’s market, and stocked up on organic veggies for our morning smoothies, along with a couple of bottles of wine. Just a side note here, a weeks worth of smoothie supplies, PLUS wine, coffee AND creamer cost less than just smoothie supplies at our local grocery store at home.(Shameless plug for Trader Joes!)

So here we sit, munching on some microwave popcorn and sipping our lovely Trader Joe’s wine, (in the proper glasses no less) feeling the 19 hours we’ve been up start to catch up with us.  Tomorrow we start on our float decorating adventure!