A bit irrelevant

I did not vote for Obama. I do not agree with him on most things. (Most, in this case, means all)

I did attend his inauguration with 3 other teachers and 44 teenagers.It was awesome.

I realize this was 3 years ago & seems totally irrelevant, but because I live in this constant state of paranoia, I am always afraid I am going to delete all of my videos, so I want to upload this one for eternity.

It is very badly recorded & very short, but I like it because it is proof I was there.

So many cool things about that event, most of which were not even overshadowed by the fact that I did not support Obama.

I LOVE History so attending an Inauguration of anyone is just fun. We actually started planning the trip a year before we went, which means we didn't even know the candidates, much less who was going to win. When Obama won that Nov, most of us were a bit disappointed. But, over the few weeks between the election & inauguration, we started to realize what a HUGE deal this whole thing was going to be.

We were there 2 days before, seeing the sights, worshiping some statues, etc.The actual day of the Inauguration we got up at 3:30 am because we had to leave the hotel by 4. We dressed in ridiculous amounts of layers because it was 14 degrees (14. that was the temperature, it was like 2 with the windchill factor). Our bus took us to this shuttle stop.where we waited with thousands of other people to cram on shuttles to take us to the National Mall. We spent about 4hours waiting there & were so afraid we weren't going to make it, or were going to be sitting on a shuttle when it started.

 Lots of people waiting in semi formed lines. It was FREEZING. And, I was reminded, yet again, why I love teenagers. They started a mass hokey pokey to try and get everyone warmed up/excited/whatever. I don't have a picture of that because I was busy participating, but you can sort of imagine.

We finally made it on the shuttles, got stuck in crazy traffic and were let off about a half mile away from the National Mall. We divided up into groups with 10 or so kids per teacher and tried our best to stay together in those groups. There was an estimated 3 million people at the Inauguration. If you have never been around this many people, you cannot imagine. The only point of reference I had before this was Neyland Stadium. I thought 107,000 was a lot, actually. Once we made it to the Mall, we staked out our place and then didn't move for a few hours. Literally. We.did.not.move. I could barely lift my arm up to take pictures because we were so crammed together. Had there been any kind of problem/situation, we would have just stood there watching as we would not have been able to escape.

It was incomprehensible.

 This was my group. Love. Please check out the giant orange scarf, made by my mom (of course), that served the purpose of keeping us all together. I made them hold onto it as I tried to pull them through crowds. I was only slightly terrified that I was going to lose someone's child in a mass of humanity where there was no cell phone reception.

 The actual swearing in/Inaugural speech was really just surreal. After teaching about presidents and showing pictures/videos of them, it was insane to actually be present at the largest Inauguration in History. Being a speck in the mass of humanity was such a cool feeling. Thinking about the fact that I didn't even vote for this man was ok because what proof that democracy works!! There I was, a non supporter of the president, but a supporter of the office of the president and AMERICA! I could just smell the democracy all around us.(It's not the freshest of smells, to be honest. Like I said, there were a lot of people crammed together.)

Because we left the hotel at 4am and didn't make it out of the mob until about 2pm, we went a long time without a potty break. There was no "running to the bathroom" during this event. I was serious about the not being able to move thing. When it was finally over we made our way to a set of port a potties that we found by their smell. This cute, clean picture was taken a few days before the Inauguration, BEFORE a few million people had used them. We had no choice but to participate in the sewer situation and I hope I never encounter anything like it again in my life. I have no idea how some of that stuff got on the ceilings.


So, there you have it. Random pics from a trip 3 years later. It was, at least, during this time in 2009, so at least that is a bit relevant.