Despite the stated rules, each year there are cars that arrive at Bohn Park before 4pm. I get it. Lots of excitement, strong desire to get a good spot, and perhaps people are driving from very far away so timing your arrival is difficult.
When I arrived the parking attendant said there was nothing he could do about the situation and that we should make a suggestion. Our group came up with an idea that I think is worthy of consideration.
Begin awesome idea…
We suggest that all cars that arrive in the first rush get put into lines. In this example, let’s say that 3 lines of cars are formed. Once the initial cars are in, hold any incoming new cars for just a moment while some magic happens. Now a die is rolled (or something else random) to determine which of the 3 lines becomes “A”. Do it again to figure out “B”, and “C” is the last one in the example. This should take just a minute or two and shouldn’t slow down the incoming cars very much, if at all. On Thursday during the drive in, it would be very simple to play traffic cop to ensure that the order of the drive in is per the designated “A”, “B” and “C” rather than the current “closest row first” approach. Cars would of course have their individual numbers to correspond with the lettered rows that they were assigned.
We feel as though this evens the playing field for all the early arrivals and removes the inevitable bad feelings of unfairness that erupt between otherwise good natured festivarians. We’ve been doing the Sunday car line up for at least 5 years now and have witnessed some very heated exchanges that are completely unnecessary.
This idea also utilizes the random aspect that is well accepted and implemented beautifully for each tarp run line up. It does not overly penalize anyone arriving early because even a bad “draw” and getting into row “C” is still a pretty good place to be.