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Mega Parties Planned To Ring In 2017

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MIAMI (CBSMiami) - The new year is just days away. So where will you be to bring it in?

Thousands plan to hit Bayfront Park for Pitbull's New Year's Revolution. Going on its third year, the event will be hosted by Snoop Dogg and Queen Latifah. It's a free event and no ticket is required. No bottles, cans, coolers or personal fireworks will be allowed.

The event will also feature the Worldwide Food and Wine Festival, which will require ticket for entry.

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Seconds before midnight all eyes will be on Miami's Big Orange as it makes its yearly ascent on the side of the Intercontinental Hotel to signal the start of the new year. Fireworks will then light up Biscayne Bay.

Up the coast, the Fort Lauderdale Orange Bowl Downtown Countdown is touted as one of the largest New Year's Eve celebrations in Florida.

The party gets underway at 4:30 p.m. along SW 2nd Street between SW 2nd and SW 5th Avenues and runs through the midnight countdown.

Downtown Countdown will feature a variety of activities for the whole family including bounce houses, slides, face painting, games, contests, line dancing with DJ William Pennhouse, live music and free caricatures.

At midnight, a 20-foot tall anchor, lit with 12,000 LED lights, will descend down from 100 feet in the air above the event's main stage as the final seconds as 2016 ticks down.

In the Keys, four unusual "drops" will highlight New Year's Eve celebrations.

For 18 years, Key West partiers have welcomed the new year with the annual "red shoe drop" starring female impersonator Sushi. Dressed in a gown and perched in a supersized red high-heel shoe suspended above the crowd, Sushi presides over festivities at the Bourbon St. Pub complex on Duval Street -- and is to be lowered in her high-heel from the complex's balcony as 2017 arrives.

A few blocks away, crowds can celebrate while watching a gigantic man-made conch shell, the symbol of the Florida Keys, descend to the roof of Sloppy Joe's Bar. In the island city's Historic Seaport, a pirate wench is to be lowered from the top of a tall ship's mast outside the Schooner Wharf Bar. And a celebration at the Ocean Key Resort is to feature a huge replica of a Key lime wedge "splashing down" into a larger-than-life margarita glass.

New Year's Eve revelry elsewhere in the Keys includes waterfront fireworks displays and parties in Key Largo and Islamorada as 2017 arrives.

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