I tried to watch the parade!

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The city's big St. Patrick's day parade started at noon today. The kids and I left around 11am. It takes us around half an hour to get to the city, and took me a good while to find a parking spot. It was already pretty crowded, but we were able to find a good spot to watch the parade from. There were blocks up along the side of the road to keep people back, and the kids and I were able to get right up front to one of these road blocks. We were still rather early, so had awhile before the parade was to start, but we waited patiently. Once the parade did finally start, a whole bunch of people decided to go sit on the other side of these blocks, IN the road! These people were now blocking our view, which was quite annoying that we'd been there far longer than they had, attempting to get a good spot, only for it to turn into a bad spot because of them. The people in the parade were throwing candy, beads, and other things into the crowd, which of course all the people on the other side of the fence were getting the majority of. There was a woman standing behind me who kept complaining that her daughter wasn't getting any of these things, so she pushed her daughter right up behind my 6 year old son helping her daughter reach for the candy. This was pinning my son up against the road block. I said something to her, and she argued with me, then said to her friend "I'm going to kick this B****'s @$$"! Excuse me? Just because I'm trying to keep my kid safe and don't see the reason why you're so desperate for some freakin candy that you can just go buy at a store? My kids were certainly disappointed they weren't getting any candy, but I said as loudly as I could "It's just candy, no need to act desperate, we can always go BUY some!!" Going through all of this wasn't really worth it. The parade honestly wasn't that impressive anyways. We watched about an hour of it, and only saw 1 high school band, one group of bag pipers, and 1 set of irish steppers. The rest of the groups in the parade were just people trying to advertise their business or religion. There was an anti abortionist group in the parade... I wondered what that really had to do with the holiday... and it's ridiculous they had to turn a fun parade into a religious announcement. So, the kids and I left long before the parade had ended. The younger ones were disappointed we had to leave, but I'm not going to risk my sanity and all of our safety for a boring parade! It's just not worth it! Did you go to your town's St. Patrick's day parade? Did you have a good time? Do you have any parade horror stories to share?