Monday, February 2, 2009

INAUGURATION DAY!












On January 18th my sister and I drove from Providence to Washington DC through a major snow storm to be in our nation's capital for the inauguration of Barack Obama! We have both been on pins and needles throughout the primaries and listened to hours and hours of NPR during the race with McCain. As a student of political science and a budding entrepreneur, I feel personally invested in the fate of our nation and I believe that we finally got this election right and have a great man taking office.

The trip to DC was awesome, cold, and exciting! I met new friends, walked miles and miles around town, visited my cousin Teresa, and joined the millions of people on the National Mall to watch the inauguration on Tuesday morning. Sunday night we arrived in town and after settling into the apartment of our friend from California, our first stop was the Washington Monument. We were there on Monday and Tuesday, too, so it very much felt like the home base for our trip. Then, on Monday, we went out to Takoma Park and had lunch with our second cousin, Teresa Rainey. She has an adorable dog and adorable house and I hadn't seen her in ages so it was great to catch up.


































The day before the inauguration we milled around the mall and hit all the major points of interest, quickly. This was our chance to get up close to the capitol building and see all the flags and swags and what not decorating the arches. We didn't really go inside anything - security and lines and crowds were totally prohibitive! Nah, we just burned calories by walking the vast expanses between the gorgeous buildings. Isn't the capitol building so small? And that's me trying to look especially fab on the steps of the Supreme Court. Let's get some really lefty judges in there and make some ch-ch-ch-changes.













































On the big day, we got up super early, went to four wrong places before finally figuring out we needed to walk about two miles around the mall to get near the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, which is where we watched a big Obama on giant jumbotrons! And in the evening, exhausted but still excited, we had dinner at the famed Ben's Chili Bowl. Sorry to say the food was not awesome, but it was pretty cool to be there anyway! Note that there is a red, white, and blue Obama ice sculpture behind us - the folks at Bens love Obama. They even added him to the list of people they serve for free (the only other person on that list is Bill Cosby).


































The whole trip was a smashing success and I loved every freezing cold minute of it! Now it's time to get down to business and all do our parts to help re-create the US into a nation we can all be proud of. Cheers to us all!

2 comments:

Angela said...

Wow, it looks like you had a great time! i'm pretty sad I didn't go. I did take the day off work to watch eleventy million hours of coverage. Hurray!

LEAHCHERRY said...

Yes, it was a great day and everyone has a wonderful story about their experience. I even love that Republicans living in DC all left the city to get away from Obama-mania!