First of all, I will admit that we were running a little late for the Sauk Rapids parade on Friday night. We do, after all, have a toddler that can take a bit of prodding to get going when it comes to going, well, anywhere.

With that being said, it was pretty frustrating to get to the parade route about an hour before the procession began only to find approximately 30% of all available area covered by chairs, blankets or ropes attached to stakes.

In my opinion leaving a chair to save your spot is cool. It only saves the spots you will actually use and you are taking some risk by leaving the chair there overnight or whatever.

The blanket thing is a little bit of a gray area. Some people use giant blankets that take up more space than they need and don't end up using all of the spots they 'reserved.' At the same time these generally seem to be used pretty fully by most people.

The people with the ropes attached to stakes gotta go. Look at the one at the top of this post! You should not be able to save that huge of an area without any representation.

It all started with people leaving chairs out and now we've taken it too far. What's next? Someone roping off an entire block for their family, only to show up five minutes before the parade? (Side note- IMAGINE ALL THE CANDY if you actually did this!)

My proposal: A limit on the size of the area that you can save per family. I'm sure people would cheat and just say that there are multiple families there and that's fine. But we need to bring some decorum back to parade spot-saving.

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