Bottleneck at L'Enfant Metro Station.

Emon woke me up at 3:30 am. I personally thought it was a miracle we made it to the metro station in Maryland by 5 am, and it actually wasn’t too busy despite all the hype beforehand. The foot traffic wasn’t too bad, but getting through the escalators and ticket machines took forever. We ended up taking the L’Enfant Plaza stop.

Metro Crowd at L'Enfant.

The Capitol Building in the distance.

Here’s a shot right outside the station. You can get a sense of what the crowd was like. At this point, I was trying to figure out the best way to get into the mall, and Twittering from my phone. Emon found where to get coffee while I google mapped our way to 14th Street and Independence Ave.

Around 6 am, right outside L'Enfant Metro Station.

 We ended up as close as you could get without paying for tickets: around 4th Street, on the mall. Around that time, my phone stopped working. I managed to get a couple emails out to people back in Madison, but the network connection died soon afterward.

Early Morning view of the Capitol Building, around 6 or 7 am.

People started to faint because the crowd at the front was packed tight. So, we decided to comb the crowd and take photos after waiting there for three hours. Turns out, the gates surrounding the mall had a pretty cool subculture going on and was a good place to get away from the huge mass of people.

Hanging out by the gates pre-inauguration. The gates followed along the north side of the mall, along with about a million toilets.

Special Police hanging out at the gates.

A place to sit down.

We caught our breath and headed back into the crowd to wait for the ceremony to begin.

There really were that many free flags. Wish I could say there were free juice boxes.

Blanket nation.

Beach ball toss before the actual swearing-in began.

Cute kid.

After hours of waiting in the cold, listening to the Inaugural concert again on the jumboscreens, and suffering through Shakira’s awkward performance, the ceremony began. First things first, Bush had to go.

The face a guy made when Bush was booed for the second, maybe third time. Ouch!

Reactions during Obama's speech.

The ceremony was epic and Obama’s speech left me without words (hence the photopost). As for the walk home, it was complicated by the exodus of people from the National Mall.

Lots of people, only one metro station.

Many took to the streets, bridges, and even interstate by foot instead.

The walk home. Yes, we can.

All of my photos are hosted on flickr. If you would like to see more from the trip to DC, please check them out!