7:15 am - We leave our house to start the trek to the "Silver gate," where we are assigned to enter with our mall standing tickets.
8:00 am - After a brisk walk with more people than we've ever seen on the street at this hour, we find the end of the line, which is a good 10 blocks away from where the gate is (note - we have no idea where we are at this point, except that it's the back of the line). See Dan's pics below of the crowd.
10:15ish am - Three hours after leaving our house, we can just see the gate (in the distance in the pic below), but no one's moving. We are surrounded by at least 20,000 people all holding silver tickets... No one is doing crowd control - when we ask Capitol Police what the deal is, they say, as far as we know, we'll keep letting people in (despite the fact that no one has moved).
10:30 am - It's do or die time. We either accept maybe not getting in, maybe not seeing or hearing anything, and maybe getting trampled when there's a mutiny (which there was - when people "stormed the silver line barricades") OR we walk home and watch on TV...
11:15 am - A picture is worth a thousand words...
All in all, we were glad we got to experience the masses, and while we would have liked to have been out on the Mall, we're glad we got to see and hear (not to mention be warm, have a bathroom, and not get trampled).
And, we're glad that we didn't travel hundreds of miles or wait 80 years to finally see a black man Inaugurated. THOSE are the folks we felt really sorry for.
Even from our comfy vantage point at home, Dan was still able to get some great photos of Aretha and President Obama. (These pics should be a commercial for HD TV!)
Several of Chrissie's colleagues - and many others - had similar issues with their blue and purple tickets. This drama has been reported both on CNN and in the Washington Post.
Finally, we also spent the afternoon with our nephew Ezra, who also was VERY excited about President Obama (or playing with Aunt Chrissie, we're not sure which).
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