Our Inauguration Experience in Photos

Filed Under News, Personal on 2009-01-27, 19:37

I’ve been meaning to sit down and write up a blog post about our Inauguration experience (the good and bad), but I haven’t gotten anywhere close to finishing it. It’s rapidly approaching that point of no return where I know I won’t actually get it done, so I figured I’d post some photos for people that were interested in hearing about it. This is just a sampling of the photos I took. You can see the full sets on Flickr:
20090120-Barack Obama’s Inauguration
Out and About around D.C.
There are also some videos I streamed from D.C. here and some others here.

We woke up at 5am and were on the streets walking to the Capitol by 6am.

All the roads around The Mall were closed to vehicles so people were walking everywhere.

Heather yawns as we wait in line for 4+ hours in the infamous Purple Tunnel of Doom.

Things got pretty crowded.

We could see light at the correct end of the tunnel after about 3 hours. We started the morning in view of the light from the other end of the tunnel.

Last two people to make it through the police barricade as the crowd/mob surged towards the gate. I would have been the last one to quickly squeeze past the cops and barriers, but Heather got pulled through since we had locked arms to avoid being separated in the crowd. A quick (almost scarily unthorough) security pat down and we sprinted to get a view of the swearing in that would happen minutes later.

This is the Purple Gate you may have heard something about in the news.

Seen on the sidewalk. It probably would not have done them any good as thousands of people with tickets didn’t even get in.

We scored a spot right at the fence for the first block of Obama’s motorcade that would later join up with the entire parade. It was a long cold wait, but we got a chance to wave at the new President as he rolled by.