COEUR d'ALENE - There's no place like home.

After decades away from its former home at Playland Pier near Independence Point, the Coeur d'Alene carousel returned to its Lake City roots on Monday.

For good.

"The biggest part is over," said Kari Fraser, treasurer of the recently established Coeur d'Alene Carousel Foundation Board, the group spearheading the effort to fund a new building for the historic ride. "Now it's about planning and fundraising."

The carousel's former owners, Duane and Carol Perron of Hood River Ore., celebrated the homecoming at Independence Point.

"I think it's great that it came back home," said Carol Perron, a Coeur d'Alene native. "It's a piece of my past."

The afternoon ceremony came on the heels of a morning's worth of work, where foundation members and volunteers spent three-plus hours unpacking the horses after they pulled into Coeur d'Alene from Oregon.

It has been less than three months since John Foote agreed to purchase the carousel for $250,000 to donate to it to the city after he read about its plight on Christmas Eve. Now, it's sitting in a storage unit on Government Way, and the immediate goal is to put a roof over its head.

Preferably, the group said, near its old stomping grounds by the Museum of North Idaho.

The 1922 Spillman carousel was at Coeur d'Alene's Playland Pier from 1949 until the mid '70s.

"You don't want to blink," said Richard LeFrancis, on the quick journey from sales block to back home. "You might miss something."

LeFrancis helped put Foote in contact with the Perrons after the carousel-collecting Perrons expressed their desire to return the machine to Coeur d'Alene, and Foote said he wanted to make that happen. Now it's here, although only one of the 20 horses made it from the storage until to its old lakeside hangout spot Monday afternoon, where the Perrons accepted the rest of the payment for the deal.

"I'm just glad it got done and it's coming back," Carol Perron, said. "And that they wanted it back."