the 44th inauguration
By Evan Young
22 Jan 2009
I wanted to see a bit of history being made, so my girl freind and I took the Metro into DC from outside the city to see what we could see. My mission for the day was to try and get a good view of the parade, but I don't know much about DC and where things are. We got off the metro at LaFonte station, and it was crazy. In terms of getting to the parade, it turned out that this wasn't the best place to be. We had to walk all the way around the national mall, but the upside was that we walked onto the mall just in time to hear the swearing in and the inaugural speech, from the washington monument, and saw the 2 million people gathered there.
I had a map of where the parade was going to be, where you could view it from, and where the secret service check points were going to be. I had made sure not to bring anything that wouldn't be allowed through the checkpoints. When I got to the checkpoints I found out that you had to have tickets, which wasn't the plan, so I found that on G street you could see the parade route through a fence... We waited there for hours... A police officer came and told us they started letting people without tickets through the checkpoint on the next block over, so we ran to get in line. Probably about 40 people made it through the checkpoint before they shut it down, right before we got there. Literally everyone in front of us got in, they shut the gate on us.
Back at the fence on G street we waited more, in the cold. When we were walking all around DC we got pretty warm, and I even broke a sweat, but standing still waiting was cold even through the multiple layers of winter gear. My toes got the worst of it, and my finger tips were having trouble as well.
When the parade came by, it was a real disappointment. The attractions were all spread out, by 10 to 15 minutes, and when the president walked by we couldn't see him at all.
The metro ride out of the city put me to sleep for the best cat nap ever, and the hot vietnamese chicken soup (pho) was just what the doctor ordered to warm me up.
It was a pretty neat day, and I'm glad I went. If it had ben warmer I might have put some more effort into getting more pictures, which was the biggest motivator to go down in the first place, but I'm happy with what I have.
2 responses
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Michael Adams gave props (22 Jan 2009):
Great story. Amazing to see the throngs of people that were in attendance! Very cool to see the shots of the subway as it really gives a feel for how many people were there! To me it's amazing how well the city fared with this many people en mass in one location! Thanks for sharing your experince with us!
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C.S. Muncy said (1 Feb 2009):
Not bad, not bad. Especially dig the shot of the gentleman in the Obama mask. More then a little surreal.
