The Rose Bowl Was Hopping

On Saturday, under a postcard blue Pasadena sky, more than 7,000 parents and children arrived for the Egg Bowl and Bunny Brunch at the historic Rose Bowl, and the fabled field took on the brisk, delighted rhythm of a spring ritual that had been patiently waiting  to happen. 

On the grass, more than 100,000 eggs sat hidden in plain sight, bright as candies and scattered with the kind of generosity that turns a hunt into a mild frenzy. Children of various age groups darted in every direction, bending, crouching, comparing finds, and racing back to adults who were already smiling before the first basket was full.

The morning and afternoon were divided into three shifts, which gave the event a pleasant, wave-like cadence. One crowd would sweep through, one would linger, one would arrive just as the last had begun to drift out, making the whole day feel like a series of miniature celebrations folded into one. The Rose Bowl, so often associated with spectacle of a different sort, became for a few hours a place of small hands, quick feet, and the intimate triumph of finding an  egg before someone else did.

“This was a blast,“ said Diana Sandoval, who brought her daughters, Caitlin and Sophia, three and seven.  respectively. “It was hard to keep them off the field before everything started,“ she laughed.

Particularly moving was the beeping egg program for visually disabled children, sponsored by the Braille Institute. The chirping eggs changed the logic of the hunt entirely, replacing sight with sound and making discovery feel both playful and inclusive. In that corner of the field, the event seemed to widen in spirit, becoming not just festive but thoughtfully designed.

By the end, parents were carrying baskets, children were clutching fistfuls of brightly colored eggs, and the stadium had the drained, happy look of a place that had hosted joy at full volume and would remember it in the grass, perhaps more than any touchdown.