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We made it to DC in record time, from Central CT to Downtown DC in just under 6.5 hours -- no speeding (I was not driving)! We even made it to Newark in 2.75hrs. Traffic was definitely on our side. We got across the GW without ever going less than 50mph. We got to DC and found a parking spot right outside our building. I'm guessing that karma will balance itself back out on Wednesday when we leave, and it'll take 12 hours for us to get home. Ugh.
After recovering from the drive and Friday night's festivities, we ventured out to see what the crowd would look like. The apartment we are staying in is 7 blocks from the Whitehouse, and a mere 3 blocks from the Lincoln memorial -- PRIME real estate. We made the mistake of immediately going through security, which was a breeze at 10am. The concert was to start at ~2:30pm.
Once inside we saw astronomical lines for food. Of course I hadn't eaten anything yet today. After wandering a bit and seeing that it would take quite a while for the mobs to fill the area, we left and headed towards 17th street in search of fooooood. To our amazement, there was an unmolested refreshment tent sitting majestically on the hill with the Washington monument. We approached with caution, thinking that something has GOT to be wrong. The attendants stared at us quizzically, and we returned the favor. After seeing a few people place real orders and give real money and get real food, we decided it was for real and got a hot dog.
Getting back in the second time took quite a bit longer, but still was only about 10 minutes. Security seemed a bit superficial, just making sure you didn't have any assault rifles in your purse or TNT dangling from your pants zipper. No metal detectors, no pat downs, no bomb sniffing dogs (that we could see). Just lots of secret service and national guard watching you distrustfully.
We pushed as far forward as we could until the crowd just wouldn't move any more. I figure we were still about 200 yards from Obama's seating area, and maybe 50 yards from the front of the mob. Not bad, but we didn't feel like standing for 4 hours in a crushing herd so we retreated back to the first jumbotron, stage right. The crowd was surprisingly sparse, enough that we found a good spot to stand and shiver. And shiver we did. It was a balmy 35F outside, but the wind coming from all directions quickly stripped you of any body heat. My purple hands are a testament to that (they were warm, just not particularly pretty):
Every few minutes they'd have Elmo or some other celebrity on the jumbotrons telling us about how they're in California, or a warming tent back stage while we're all out here freezing our butts off. It wasn't much, but it shut the crowd up for a few minutes at a time. In typical government fashion, our jumbotron appeared to be powered by none other than the venerable Windows XP. As you can imagine, we had nothing but trouble with it. The sound and video kept going in and out, and at one point after the jumbotron went dark for ~10 minutes, it came back with the not-so-comforting "Windows XP" logo. You can only imagine the jeers let out by the 30,000 or so people in our little section.
The event began with the invocation, and the volume was far, far, to low. Strange because the volume had been fine all along. Audio/Visual nerds strike again, and believe you me-- the crowds let them know. All around the area you could hear an instant roar of "turn it up" echo from one giant mob to another. It was really impressive how within 2 or 3 seconds, the entire crowd of (half a million?) were chanting "turn it up!". By the end of the prayer, they had fixed the volume, and the jumbotron was only going blank once or twice every 10 minutes.
And THEN the celebrities rolled in. I won't even try to remember all, you can google it if you'd like. But it started with Bruce Springstein, and went on through folks like Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, Mary J Blige, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Garth Brooks, Samuel L Jackson, Jack Black, etc etc etc. There's at least 40 others I'm not recalling. One after the other, they'd come out and sing something or say something... and just when you thought it couldn't get any cooler they would announce the next person.
The whole thing lasted about 2 hours, and was well worth the wait. I'm guessing the concert will have been much more exciting than the actual inauguration - other than marking the day that we no longer have an international criminal running our country.
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