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Our Rose Bowl Trip
Left to Right: Jen, John, Ryan, Mike, Brian and Mark
Our Trip
John, Mike, Mark, Brian and Myself (Ryan) left from Carlinville Illinois in the early, early morning of December 28th and headed west, Destination: Rose Bowl. We left the frozen tundra of the midwest and headed out to sunny California. The trip in whole took about 30 hours each way. We were gone for a week and returned the 3rd.
The First Leg
The first part of the trip was a drive from Carlinville, IL to Amarillo, TX. Here are some pics:
This wonderful example of a
"Meximullet" was spotted at a Dairy Queen along the way. Notice
the length of the plumage and the obvious baldspot. And, if you look
close, that's me in the background pretending to pose next to a water jug as an
excuse to take this mullet's picture. Just try to imagine Mike saying
"Hey that's a cool water jug, go stand next to it, we'll get a
picture."
This is Mike's Nose, profiled of course. If you download the picture and zoom in a little bit it really can give you a pretty good idea of why we call him "The Schnoz." On a side note, this was just the first day and look how bored I was already....
The
Big Texan
The Big Texan is possibly the coolest place ever. Click on the
link above to check out their webpage. Being called the Big Texan, it's
obvious that everything in the restaurant is as large as possible, including the
72 oz. steak they serve, free of charge. Well, free as long as you can eat
all of it within an hour. While we were there, we convinced Mark to give
it a try and got a few pictures. Check them out.
Mark signing his life away to eat
this steak.
Mark finally gets his meal.
He had to sign before he was allowed to eat.
These are some little kids that just HAD
to get This is the
steak about halfway gone. Still
their picture taken with
Mark.
looks like a huge piece of meat, huh?
This is Mark's final look of pain with
just over one minute left on the timer and a large amount of steak still on the
plate. You can almost feel his pain. Don't hurl mark! Don't
worry, you'll always have your Bullie (if anybody wants to know about the bullie
ask one of us).
Look at these partners. Straight
out of the wild west. These are some real Texans right here. I
spotted these guys busting in the swinging doors of the local saloon. They
rolled in from out of town and started causing trouble. Damn cowboys.....
This is the giant bull, we had to stop
on the way back just for more photo ops.
What can I say? The restaurant
was closed and we had to go.
New Years Eve
New Years Eve we
celebrated at Universal Studios Hollywood, which was a blast.
Here are some of the pictures from that:
Here's Brian and Mark walking up to the park, and later on the neon sign everybody's seen before.
Left to right: Brian, Mark,
Ryan. This is on the Universal Studios Studio Tour. We got to ride
around and see some pretty cool stuff around there and had a tour guide who
seemed, at least to me to be a little borderline on the sexual preference, if
you catch my drift here.
After the park closed there was a big party outside. It was pretty crazy, here are some pictures from that. Some turned out a little blurry, but what do you expect? I'm no professional.
Some buildings and the jumbotron.
There was a live band there, I'm not sure about the name but I think it was the
Tories or something, but that's them on the jumbotron.
Brian and Mike on the left
there. Like I said, blurry. And a picture of the crowd on the
right. It was packed.
Just some more crowd shots. I
tried to give an impression of how many people were there.
I thought this gorilla was pretty
cool looking so I took a picture, and as you can see on the right is the Hard
Rock guitar. Pretty sweet.
The Game
We finally made it to the Rose Bowl, here are some pictures from at and around the game:
The stadium and Mark, Mike and myself
standing in front of the ROSE BOWL!!
Here's a couple of good shots of the
scenery around the stadium.
These are a couple of shots from
inside the stadium, on the left, pretty empty, just as we came in and on the
right, just before kickoff.
Here we have some play developing,
and the All American Marching Band performing.
Kind of a blurry night shot here and
the back of some bald guy with sideburns's head
Some Other Pictures
This picture is large because if you
look closely this building says "FAG" on it. I don't know what
it means, but it seemed funny at the time.
Here is my artistic rendering of
"the Hat" (one of two). Notice the lighting. I think it's
quite striking.
Mike having a really good time before
the game.
This is Mark downing a packet of
"Buttermilk" from Jack In the Box. It turned out it was
basically Ranch dressing.
And, finally Mike "pregaming."
That a Pepsi mom, I swear it.