Still a warm up to post about the parade...

The night before Macy's

 the whole group of us

 caught a train

  to the upper west side.

There was the museum, of course,

and

the BIG balloons were being inflated.

We wanted to see what the fuss was all about.

It's an impressive undertaking to get the massive characters full of helium and then weight them down to spend the night on the street.

Turns out the pre-parade hulla-balloo(n) is almost as much fun as the big event.