The Inauguration

Here's our photo essay of the inauguration. For those of you on Facebook, you'll notice many of the same pictures and captions from Brian's album. But for the rest of you - it'll be new!

After we stood in line to get our tickets on Monday, we strolled around the capital the day before the inauguration.



Here's Brian in front of the capital.



Here's a nice artistic shot of the Capital that Brian took on Monday.



A Monday look at the seating area for the big shots/celebs who gave a lot of cash to the Obama campaign. The bad news for us poor slobs who had to stand? They got seats. The good news? They could see about as much as we could.The Capital is a very large place. I don't think they could see the President any better than we could.



Here I am in front of the "Big Shots" area as Brian would say.



Now, Brian gets his turn to be a big shot! Notice, there's still fence between us and the big shots - even on the day before the inauguration.



This is the official jumbotron screen where we could see everyone up close.



As you can imagine, Brian - our MSU Graduate - was quite excited to see an entire Spartan bus in D.C. during the inauguration. There was tons of other college students as well.



Here's a shot of the Capital at about 5:30 to 6 a.m. on inauguration day. We stayed in Baltimore and left our friend's house at about 3:10 a.m. By the time we were close to the Metro Greenbelt stop at 3:45 a.m., it was already full. The station had opened at 3:30 a.m. We drove one stop up to College Park and found plenty of spots and even got seats on the Metro - surprisingly. Oddly enough, the 30 mile drive from Baltimore to the Metro stop was fine with no traffic problems.



Here's just some of the people we were standing nearby.



Dawn breaks on the Capital and as Brian pointed out, those "Big Shots" are still likely cozy warm in their beds.



This is the view looking behind us. You can see crowds of people lined up to Washington Monument. In fact, crowds were lined up all the way to the Lincoln Memorial.



Now, can see that some of those big shots have woken up and are getting seated. By the way, each time the announcer would say, "please be seated," the entire mall erupted in laughter since most of us 2 million were standing.



Does it seem like we're a bit closer all of a sudden? Well, we are. We're now right across from the reeflecting pool - close to those pictures on Monday. We had hoped to be right by the reflecting pool, but when we arrived at about 4:45 a.m., we learned that security wasn't letting anyone in that area, even though the map showed "silver section" tickets would be there. We must have been in the rowdy group because all of a sudden people in front of us, "bum-rushed" the plastic gates and suddenly we were in that coveted spot -right by the reflecting water.



More and more people.



A nice shot of the reflecting pool.



Another nice view. Obama stood right where the camera stand is located.



There's the new president of the United States - the "test run" of the oath. We couldn't quite see him with our eyes, but had a great view of the jumbotron.




Now, we're all heading out. We chose to walk about a mile away to an "out of the way" metro stop. As you can imagine, there was no isolated metro stop, but we did get seats all the way back. Surprisingly again, traffic was just fine as we headed back to Baltiimore. We had a bit of time to catch a nap before we caught our flight back to Detroit that night.