I'm sitting here watching the Inauguration Concert online and finding myself crying every time there's a shot of the Lincoln Memorial. It's going to be a long afternoon.
Mark and I figured out yesterday that logistically, we hadn't a hope to make it down to the Mall for the concert today. So instead, I took my ten mile run down to the Mall this morning and carried with me my new super duper tiny elph camera. More shots are available on Flickr.
The energy as everyone was arriving was amazing. Everyone smiled and greeted each other and offered to take photos to preserve these precious moments. Including me, you can see!
I couldn't get all that close to the site of the concert, but instead ran up to the Capitol to look at the preparations for the swearing in on Tuesday. I hope the photos give you all some sense of the enormity and complexity of the preparations. There are 500,000 people expected here today and around 2 million on Inauguration Day. The Mall is expected to be jam packed - all 2.2 miles of it.
It's at times like these that I feel so privileged and lucky to live in the DC area. There is such an incredible sense of history and significance in this city. Over the past 16 years, I have slowly and inexorably fallen in love with this country and especially with its system of government (imperfect though it is) and the extraordinary struggle that it went through to get here, from the revolutionary war to the civil war that simultaneously nearly destroyed and validated the "new nation, conceived in Liberty," and through the civil rights battles of the past century.
OK. I seem to have stopped crying now.
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