Inauguration Weekend

A crowd of about 400,000 people came to this concert on the National Mall that surrounded the reflective pool of the Lincoln Memorial. Aaron, Emily and I drove up on the Saturday before this event and stayed in an empty apartment that Aaron's sister-in-law owned that was two blocks from the Watergate. Aaron's mother lives at the Watergate so this was our home base for the inauguration weekend. 

This concert was a star studded event that included artists and actors including Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Bono, John Mellencamp, James Taylor, Sheryl Crow, Garth Brooks, Steve Carell, Jack Black, Beyonce, and many more. Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama gave a speech near the end of the ceremony.  Below is a video of Obama's speech near the end of the concert. 

On Tuesday, inauguration day we got up at about 7:30am and headed towards the mall at about 8:30am. We figured that we would not get very close but we wanted to get near the Washington Monument because this was a higher ground and from there we would be able to see in both directions toward the Capitol and towards the Lincoln Memorial and look out over the crowd. We had been talking to other people who said there would be leaving at 5am or earlier to get a good spot. We were not quite that enthusiastic and it worked out really well for us. We basically walked right in at the Lincoln memorial and were able to make it up to exactly where we wanted to next to the Washington Monument. There was a good size crowd, but I guess because we were going to be so far away from the Capitol there was no security. By the time we got to where we wanted to be we had about another hour to wait in the freezing cold before the show started. The cold doesn't really set in until you stop and stand still for a little while. 

The crowd was already very large (art of crowd counting) at this point, and the entire mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument was already filled up, although both sides of the mall would continue to fill up and back out the side streets. Here is a satellite image of the crowd. Several large screen TVs were set up about every hundred yards or so and we watching one of the last ones back. The crowd and the greeters were all pretty happy and pumped up. 

The photo below is of the Washington Monument looking away from the Lincoln Memorial. This picture was taking shortly after Obama's inauguration while the crowd was dispersing. We came from the opposite side of this monument where we were watching the inauguration on TV screens with the Capitol building and a sea of people in the background.  For more inauguration photos I found a slide show with a lot of good pictures including some of the crowd taken from the Capitol and looking out towards the Washington Monument taken by the BayAreaNewsGroup.