Attended the Sakura Cherry Blossom Festival yesterday and was incredibly disappointed. First, the parking situation was insane. There must have been thousands of people attending and the Botanical Gardens parking lot had space for maybe a couple hundred cars? People started parking all along the sides of the two-lane entry road, in people’s driveways, filled the parking lots of nearby restaurants and stores, etc. It took almost an hour for us to find a place to park in the city zoo’s overflow parking area, along with the hundreds of other people that were parked there for the Festival. We stopped by the bathrooms first, where there were only four stalls for women and two of them had no toilet paper. There were dozens of women lined up to use the two working stalls. When we did finally make it to the Festival it was such a letdown. There were only about ten small booths for all these people to visit, so each booth was swarmed with people. If you wanted to see what the booth actually had, you had to stand in line for a very long time. Often, when we finally made it to the booth, it was something that didn’t interest us at all: a manga trivia booth, two kids craft booths, etc. There was only ONE food booth that was in no way prepared to feed all these people. Both times I stopped by, they had ran out of food again and were waiting for another delivery. There was also nowhere to buy water. I walked back to the front of the park to buy some from the soda vending machines only to find they were both out of order. After a couple of hours we left tired, hot, hungry, and very thirsty. If the city is going to continue hosting this event, I would highly suggest extending the Festival to last multiple days so thousands of people aren’t trying to attend in the limited window on Saturday. There also needs to be many more booths, including food booths, and easy access to water. Will not be attending again.