It’s Nacho Time

Yesterday I chilled out at the National Museum of Natural History and made friends with a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. Neat-o!

A few weeks ago a friend and I biked to the Great Falls in Maryland. THEY WERE SO COOL!
Who knew that you can bike for a couple hours and there you are looking at some serious waterfalls? This is the sort of thing you can’t get in NYC.
The book I used, Road Biking Washington DC, is of course a road biking book, so the route there was all along roads. Once we got there, however, we realized we could just take the C&O Canal all the way back to DC. That was some of the most beautiful trail I’ve seen.

Here’s a picture next to an old pumping station or something along the canal.

As the sun rose on the National Mall, I could already tell that it was packed. Since much earlier that morning people were standing shoulder to shoulder around us. I felt a little guilty that we had enough room to stretch out. The sleeping bag kept me from most of the cold, but that morning as it got lighter, it seemed to get even colder. I’m not sure what time it was when they started replaying the Inaugural concert on the Jumbotrons, but whet “Shout” came on, I decided it was time to stand up before I got trampled. THEN I started to really feel the cold that everyone had been experiencing for the past several hours (since Inauguration, I have gone through a box of Kleenex and at least three travel packs). It was so cold that my water bottle was freezing up:

My Inauguration Day Wardrobe:

• 2 pairs of Smartwool Socks (Andrenaline Lt and Streethikers)
• flannel pijama pants
• jeans
• Smartwool “Next to Skin” wool top
• American Apparel thermal long sleeved shirt
• REI Staff Vest
• EMS Down Jacket
• EMS Skullcap
• wool hat with earflaps
• Merrell Chameleon Hex light hiking shoes
• Fox River Gripper Gloves

Everyone was bundled up.

Finally, it was time for the main event:

I really did almost cry during the speech. The only thing wrong is that I didn’t have my own little flag to wave around like a maniac!

Then, it was all over. This is where it really started to get crazy. The police decided it would be a great idea to open up only a couple of exits for a couple million people on the Mall. We decided to try our luck at L’Enfant Plaza metro station. This was a mistake. We found ourselves in the middle of TONS of people all heading back to their tour buses. Along the way we lost the shortest member of our group. At this point, I got on a friend’s shoulders and we waded through the crowd shouting her name. Besides the fact that we lost someone, it was tons of fun, and the crowd seemed very amused as well. The good news is that she made it back home, but we lost about an hour in that crowd without getting anywhere.

We circled around the west side of the Mall towards Foggy Bottom/GWU metro station, but it was pretty clear that we would never get on a train over there. While G didn’t get on a train, I at least took a pretty cool picture while we were in the neighborhood.

We eventually made our way to Dupont Circle which was much more manageable. After a few hours of trying, our group made it home, and I went right to sleep.

All in all, it was worth it. My sleep schedule’s back on track, my cold is almost gone, and I can say that I was there.

- Tim

(for more pictures, be sure to check out my Flickr set)

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I did not  go to bed the night of January 19. Instead,  I left with a group of friends at 1am en route to the National Mall. We didn’t have tickets, so we had to take our chances. Our plan was to take the last train out of Tenleytown at 1:55am on the Red Line towards Farragut North. From there we would walk south to the Mall and grab our spots. It wasn’t so simple. Here’s how we did it. See the map above for our route with all the landmarks marked out. A full set of pictures is right here. 

As soon as we got to Farragut North, we walked south on 17th St until a police officer told us we would have to go East on H St until we cleared the capitol arond 3rd St. Along the way, cops kept giving us different information. One told us that we had “serious issues,” that they weren’t letting people in until 8am, and there was something seriously wrong with us for getting up so early. I think he must’ve been a Republican. Another told us 4am, and yet another 7am. It was clear that no one really knew what was going on.

Once we hit Chinatown, we started heading more south than east until we got to the gate at 3rd St in front of the Dept of Labor. We sat down to wait for the gates with everyone else. This is where it really started to feel like we were in some quarantine-zone during the zombie apocalypse. Every now and then they would herd everyone back to D St so they could do a bomb sweep. This kept reshuffling the order, and those of us who got there early lost our spots. Very frustrating. This is also when we learned that they wouldn’t open the gates until 7am. It was only 4, and we weren’t just going to sit and wait. A friend had gone to explore, and he had made it to the other side of the Mall and reported a much better situation. He could see the capitol, there were no gates. We decided to take our chances and move.

We began walking south under the Mall through the 3rd St Tunnel. An erie experience, to say the least.

When we got out, we headed north again until we found ourselves in the middle of the Silver ticketed zone. It was almost too good to be true; there was an astounding view of the capitol lit up at night.

We decided not to risk getting kicked out of the ticketed zone so we headed over to the General Public area. We walked right on from the East, no gates, no one stopping us. We found a nice spot in front of a Jumbotron with a great view of the capitol. We set up camp and hunkered down at half past 4 in the morning to wait for the ceremony to begin. This is where the sleeping bag came in handy.

- Tim

to be continued…