The day has come. It seemed as if the whole country was waiting for these last eight years to be over (or at least 95% of the DC population). We are going to wake up tomorrow and everything will be different right?
The swearing-in ceremony started at 11:30am and the parade was supposed to start at 2:30pm. The MPD said that there were 500,000 people on the mall at 9am. I was still asleep. We rolled out around 10:45 perfected our arrival on the mall at about 11:30. The security zone was huge and started up around K street again. We could bike all the way down to the mall though so that just meant open streets to us. You couldn’t walk across the parade route of Pennsylvania AVE so many thousands were walking west around the White House. We ditched our bikes and easily walked on to the mall at the last minute with thousands of others.
Reports from 6am said that thousands of people were already on the mall having trouble getting through security check points. Barriers were pushed down and DC cops had no control. The news reported that many VIP ticket holders, who arrived at some early un-Godly hour, never even got through their gate to the Inauguration. Later on the west end of the mall were we were at things were calm. Lots of National Guardsmen were on hand and were friendly. We hung out at the WWII memorial and Lisa shot some video. I never saw the east end of the mall but I assume it was a sea of people. Metro reported a new record of 930,000 people as of 6pm.
Once the swearing-in ceremony was over I think everyone started walking home. Whole streets were filled with masses of people. We breached security on 19th ST and rode back to Keren to have some ful. I rode home afterwards and there were still thousands of people walking back from the mall of course. Even back in Virginia there were people walking back in to my neighborhood.
The parade started over an hour late due to Kennedy's collapse at their luncheon. Had I known I might have tried to use that time to find a spot on the parade route. Obama got out of the Presidential tank and walked twice. It would have been nice to see that, the crowds along the route didn't look too bad. I'm sure most people had issues getting there. A million people just don't fit on the sidewalks of Penn AVE. Thankfully nothing tragic happened on this day our President was so accessible.
Can't you sense the change today?
UPDATE: Metrorail’s Top Weekday Ridership Days
# Date Ridership Event
1 01-20-09 1,120,000 Obama Inauguration
2 01-19-09 866,681 Obama inaugural events
3 07-11-08 854,638 Baseball/Women of Faith Conference
4 06-09-04 850,636 Reagan State Funeral
5 06-25-08 846,388 Smithsonian Folklife Festival/Baseball
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