Inauguration!

One of the perks of living in DC is that a lot of cool government stuff is really easily accessible. Including the inauguration. Since I had the day off, I decided to go. And I convinced Kevin to come with.

We planned it out pretty well. We knew we'd never get close enough to see Obama, so we decided to stay towards the back of the mall where we could at least see a Jumbotron and here the speeches. And we decided to skip the parade in the hopes of beating the crowd home. I even packed sandwiches and bottled water so we wouldn't have to deal with crowds and unreasonable prices when we got hungry.

The parade route blocked off half of the city, which meant that we had to get off the train at Farragut West and walk the mile south to the mall, then cut east to find a place to watch the events. The walk was crowded, though not too bad. They'd closed off 18th street for everyone to walk down. And people were selling everything from hats and t-shirts to programs to bookmarks as we made our way south.

When we got to the mall a little after 10, the processional had already started. It takes a really long time for everyone to walk in, mostly because they space people out so far. Kevin and I played some cribbage while we waited for the actual ceremony to start.

Towards the end of the procession, the sound and video started getting a little wonky. The video would black out for a second before coming back. By the time the actual ceremony started, this had gotten worse. We only caught about half of the first speech and it wasn't long before we were missing more than we were hearing.

Rather than stay and wait to see if this would get fixed, we decided to find a bar where we could catch the speeches and get a beer. Since there's nothing on the mall and so many streets were closed, this required us to walk all the way back up, past Farragut Square, to a bar I used to go to for happy hour with people from work. We got there not long after Obama's speech and were able to hear it and the songs sung by Kelly Clarkson and Beyonce. Then we hoofed it back to the metro station to beat the crowds.

This ended up working out pretty well. Not only were we able to both say we'd been there and watch Obama in the comfort of a heated bar, we narrowly missed a broken train that seriously delayed everyone getting out of the city. All in all, not a bad day.