The inaugural weekend has come and gone.  It was a whirl, even if we didn’t participate as much as some.

Our inaugural adventure started Sunday by attending We Are One, the kickoff concert for the inaugural festivities.  We rode over to the Mall and parked by one of the closer in entrances.  We were in the security line for about an hour, but most people were pleasant and the line kept moving.  Once inside, we waited with our 500,000 best friends for another hour or so for the concert to start.  The wait and crowd was definitely worth experiencing the star studded event first hand.  The concert was awesome and the group dynamic was intense.  There were a lot of sing-a-long type songs and the crowd’s energy was great.

I took a lot of photos, but they all look pretty much the same, just with different dots on the jumbotron screen.  This particular dot is the Man of the Hour himself, President-Elect Obama.  We were about halfway down the reflecting pool, so Ben’s view was pretty good.  My view was a bit obscured by the fact that a lot of people are taller than me.

Please excuse the photo quality.  Our camera charger has gone missing, so the BlackBerry is in charge of photography for the time being.

Tuesday’s events didn’t go quite as planned.  We left the apartment around 7:30, thinking four hours would be sufficient to get through security.  Our estimate was completely wrong.  We got stuck in the bottleneck around the Capitol building of those folks with actual tickets.  That was probably the scariest part of the morning because people were starting to panic a bit.  As we were smooshed in hip to hip, a “push, push, push” chant started up.  Not good.

Having gotten past the first crowd, we thought we’d be able to make it in the 7th St. entrance.  No such luck as that section was already full to capacity.  We kept walking to get to the next entrance at 14th St.   Two blocks away we found ourselves on the opposite side of the street from the security line which wasn’t moving at all.  If we had pushed on, we might have been able to get in behind the Washington Memorial, but we decided the crowd was just too overwhelming and turned around.

So like a lot of the country, we ended up watching the inauguration on the internet.  Our connection was dragged down quite a bit, so that by the time we finished watching the inauguration “live”, we were almost 20 minutes behind real time.

While life is more or less back to “normal” here in DC now (besides the abnormal amounts of tour busses still clogging the streets), I think I noticed a little bit of an inaugural happiness-hangover yesterday.  When I went grocery shopping everybody was super polite, much more so than normal.  It was nice to see so many people smiling and making an effort to be kind to one another.  Hopefully we can keep those warm fuzzies around for a while.