Inauguration Day~January 20, 2009

Well, we made it to D.C., we thought this would be the day of days, and it was, but not quite in the way we planned or expected! We were disappointed along with many (at least tens of) thousands of others who were shut out by security and not allowed onto the lawn or wherever we would have ended up to see the actual inauguration. It was sad, yes I cried, but I can still say I was there, somewhere. And, knowing that we weren't the only ones, even thousands (according to the local news out here) of ticket holders were not allowed in as well. It made me feel a little better. We headed out at 8:00 AM and were stuck with others who had left their homes locally at 3:00 AM. Believe me, it sure made me feel better that I didn't make my family get up at 2:00 like I wanted, they would have really been upset with me.
We waited for hours, squished in crowd, but everyone was in the same boat. Everyone was polite and friendly, we were very warm at this point because we were all wrapped up in layers and layers of clothes, coats, gloves, hats, scarves, and long johns. Rachael got pretty squished a few times as people began getting anxious and wanted to get through the shut gates. To tell you the truth, at times I felt like the people on the Titanic that got stuck behind the gates and weren't able to get to the top or to lifeboats.
Then around 1:30 PM or so, we were finally let through. At that point, everyone was very excited, except they only let about 3 people in at a time to go to yet another line for security checks. Rachael got pulled through ahead of us because the police were worried about kids getting squished and trampled, but I kept shouting, she's with me, she's my daughter. They kept nodding that they knew and held her to the side till I went through. After about 5 long minutes, she & I were rejoined and then we went on to security. Paul & Jake were still behind the gates in the shoving crowd somewhere. Good thing we had agreeded on a meeting place.
After we were all through and reunited, we attempted to use the lovely outhouses. There were many of rows of them, fun! They were pretty bad and lots of them didn't have the ever important toilet paper. Not fun!