Boski's Inauguration Experience

Well gang Boski is back from DC after living through Obama's presidential inauguration and what a trip it was. I'm not sure if I will ever do it again but I was glad I was there and got to experience it. This post may run long and I will try to do things in chronological order. We departed VA Beach around 5:05 am. I was expecting to make it as far as Richmond before we hit stand still traffic. Boy was I shocked. The roads were wide open. I think everyone feared traffic and so headed in super early. We were getting reports in that there was already a million peeps on the mall at like 8am. We had to park at RFK and so we did a juke and got on 301 from I-95. Man did that work, we rolled in at 9am when we were thinking around 10 or 1030. They had shuttle buses going from RFK to the mall and from what we saw it looked like the line was hella long so we (our own group as everyone was on their own) decided to walk. In our group was myself, hova, debs, kathy g, and our owner. The walk was about 2 miles, oh and let me touch on the weather....fucking cold. Around 28-30 degrees and windy. Boski had one of those headband ear warmer hat things, hova joked me on it, and left it in my car so I forced to wear my old school adidas beanine. Which probably did a better job but left my hair crazy. We walk in and decide to head over to union station to get a starbucks. All I could see were people. I've never seen so many people before in my life. We got our starbucks, and headed out.

Oh and let me tell you about a VIP we had on our bus, little Joey. We did an essay contest that people could enter (partnering with the Urban League) and random peeps could enter their essay and try to win a spot on our bus. Joey is in 4th grade, and hes really into history. Basically hes really nice but a dork. Where most 4th grade boys have sports players, cars, and girls on their walls in their room little Joey has a copy of the constitution, pictures of the white house, and president bobble head figures....and yes that is the truth. He got an article in the paper about he wanted to go so bad that he decided to enter the contest. He didn't win, but we had some extra seats and so as a good publicity stunt on our part gave him and his mom a seat on our bus. We got great press from it. Well Glen Nye (one of our representatives from our area) read the story in the paper he decided to steal Deb's thunder (she organized the giving of the seats on the bus to Joey) and gave him actual tickets to get into the seating area. But little Joey still wanted a ride up. Well let me tell you this kid was a dork, and I think his mom kept him sedated cause he seemed like he was on another planet. More on Joey in a few

Another thing that we saw everywhere was headcases trying to hustle. Obama T-shirts, hats, pins, buttons, pictures, DVDs, flags, 1 for 5$ 3 for $10. Guys had raps..."Obama Ts and DVDs". It was nuts. There were only a few protesters. Some guy was walking around with a big cross. Saying he was a Muslim or something. No KKK members or anything like that though. The security was always present but never oppressive. So we start walking and come up to one of the gates were people with tickets were trying to get in. They weren't letting them in. Our owner spotted one of the Kennedy's (not Ted) who couldn't even get in. Boski folded up his little map and was yelling "I've got a ticket". I then tried to get a "LET US IN" chant going but it didn't happen. We ended up getting close to the capital on one of the side streets and didn't even make it to the mall. We couldn't really see very well but the big thing was we could not hear anything. There were no speakers in our area. We actually watched it on a TV in a bar through a window (they had the tv on closed caption so we could read what he was saying and some guy had it broadcasting on his phone). If anyone lived in Kentucky you would see Boski on the news as one of their local reporters was doing a report right in front of me. When they started doing the 21 gun salute people thought they were bombing for a minute which I found funny. After it was said and done we went back to union station, got on the metro and ended up somewhere on Pennsylvania Ave. and had to wait 40 minutes to get into a El Rodeo type mexican. It was cool because they had Margaritas by the pitcher, which we got and they gave us a shot of Tequila on the house for me and Hova. Before we got there and when we got off the metro we probably saw someone die.

Me and Hova had our backs to the guy and were standing in the street when we heard a loud "THUD" and it felt like the ground moved. It turns out this old guy had just something like a heart attack or a seizure because he fell from the curb straight onto the street and was stiff as a board and then started having convulsions. There were officers right there and radioed in for help and people started yelling for a doctor and some guy ran over and then everyone started circling around him so we just left. Dude was not in good shape.

We then heard that their was mini riot at the purple gate (the color coded gates was the areas that ticket holders got in). This was the same gate that Boski tried to get the let us in chant going. The riot was due to people not being let in. We did get some good views of snipers on the buildings and "uniformed" secret service guys inspecting union station as on of the balls was going to be held there. We'd see motorcades of black suburnas with like 6 cop cars escorting them and we're like whos in that one? We walked back to the bus and left around 5pm getting home around 9-930 which was not bad at all.

All in all I'm glad I went to experience but I don't think its anything I'll ever do again. My feet still hurt (i'm going to write puma as those shoes did not do the trick). They really should hold it in the spring when its you know above freezing. Oh and little Joey didn't make it to his seat. We found out from his mom that the reason why all the gates for ticket holders had problems was because the metal detectors started malfunctioning and they didn't have any back up ones. Joey ended up getting into Congress by calling Glen Nye and watching it in his office which is pretty cool. I'm not sure if I got everything down. I'm still thawing out.