Inauguration Sensation: Adventures in DC (Inauguration Day)

I had the opportunity to go to DC for the Inauguration of Barack Obama a couple weeks ago, and here's what it looked like. I figure, if I was lucky enough to get 'community credentials' to the DNC speech at Invesco Field here in Denver last August, I might as well go for broke and sign up for ceremony tickets through my Congressperson.

A couple days after the election, I submitted my info online. Congresswoman Diana Degette got thousands of requests and within days, the form was taken down from her site. Each member of Congress received a mere handful of tickets to dole out to their constituents, and I got two! Luck of the Irish, I guess.

I gave my extra to the person who most deserved it, a friend of mine who had worked on the campaign since the primaries (if anyone can claim that they helped win a key county during the Indiana primary with any degree of credibility, it's her). 20-hour days, multi-state canvassing, registering people around the country with the power of her cell-phone, I was impressed and humbled by her commitment to Obama's campaign.

Day 1. I arrived the afternoon before, and the streets around the Capitol were INSANE. I had a front-porch view of the DNC in Denver last summer, but this took crowd control to the next level. Any street within five blocks of the Capitol or Pennsylvania Ave were barricaded with those metal gates so pedestrians and cars wouldn't run into each other. Key metro stations were clogged, traffic was clogged, people were excited. I was excited.

And it was cold.

After settling in my uncle's condo (he works at the Pentagon and lived oh so close to downtown, so lucky in that regard), I immediately booked it to the Rayburn House Building to get my tickets. Stood in line for an hour or so in the DC cold. People in Denver are so spoiled with the lack of humidity here. This was bone-chilling cold. After getting tix, I meandered through the House Building just to soak in the bureaucracy.


Tickets in hand, I checked out the seated parts of the ceremony (only 28,000 for 240,000 tickets). It was a sight. People from all around the country were taking their pictures in front of this rare scene. It was quickly growing dark but that didn't deter anybody from soaking it all in. Camera phones and pro-grade camcorders were blazin'. I walked down the Mall towards the Washington Monument in the bitter night cold, passing by thousands of people, street vendors selling their Obama gear, and the MSNBC ad-hoc headquarters, catching sight of CHRIS MATTHEWS! The crowds rivalled the DNC and it was awesome to mingle with like-minded people. Again, cold!

But I had to get back to base. 4:30am wakeup time the next morning because I had to be in this situation by 7am::


This is about a mile into the silver-ticket line, the very back of all the sections, behind the Reflecting Pool. As toe-numbing cold as it seemed, it could have been colder. I'd say this is about 25 degrees, but no wind, and no sign of snow. (Celebrity alert: I saw James Carville pass by while I was in line.) About an hour later, the sun started illuminating the Mall and we herded towards the Capitol::


The great irony is they didn't even check for my tickets at the gate. They did a quick patdown for security, they looked at camera, and I was in. I'm sure they checked for SOME tickets (and I'm sure they did so with the closer sections), but it was just humorous. Some of the lucky few to get in::


This is behind the Reflecting Pool. It was oddly quiet here. The size of the Mall is so large that we had no sense or view of the millions of people gathering there. Here, though, people didn't crunch together to get closer to the Capitol grounds, everyone was pretty chill (get it, chill); there was definitely a communal vibe. I guess each individual there had that common purpose of being at the ceremony in whatever capacity they could. Here was the view::


But even this was a little too far for me (pish-posh). See that fence that's made of plastic and very trampable? Yeah, about twenty minutes passed until we casually followed a couple miscreants and booked it to the front side of the Reflecting Pool (where those trees are), and got this view instead::


Much better! Dead center, just close enough to actually see Obama move. We were among the first to fill this unintended space, and some thin people actually squeezed through those barriers to get into the Capitol grounds before the police arrived on their bikes. I don't know why they didn't plan for this space to be filled for the ceremony; I guess crowds tend to find places on their own!

The police were very nice::


Certainly a momentous event. I still can't wrap my head around it. No matter what political stripes you wear, you had to be amazed at the sight of 1.8 million people from around the world gathering in one place to witness this inauguration. The crowd stretched from the Capitol steps all the way to the Washington Monument, with a pocket of people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial beyond. The sound of various segments of the Mall cheering was very surreal. From where we stood, way up close, we had no chance of seeing these crowds for ourselves, but those distant roars painted the picture for us. You just had to soak it in.




Probably the most lively part of the ceremony was watching the footage on the jumbotron of Mr. and Mrs. Bush get into Marine One. Soon you could hear the helicopter blades from behind the Capitol. We all waved goodbye (or thanks? depends on who you are, I guess) as the helicopter approached us. The Bush Family passed right over us for one last tour of the Mall before gettin' the heck back to Texas.


A feast of color the whole day::


Ceremony over, next up was the Parade. Except I couldn't get tickets on Ticketmaster. Lines to get even into earshot of the Parade were so long, and the chilly wind grew soon after the ceremony, and the clouds gathered. So we were pretty well content to watch the Parade, the one that was happening like a couple blocks away, from within the warm smoky confines of a cigar bar in the Federal Triangle. Beer and spinach dip tastes so good after standing for seven hours in the DC cold...


Exhausted, I metroed it back to the condo and watched coverage of the Inaugural balls on MSNBC. Like I was going to go through all that after going through all this. So glad I went! Coming up next, images of my DC adventures museum-hopping and monument-visiting after everybody else left. Stay tuned...