Inauguration Adventure

I am not sure where the month of January has gone, but here we are almost 2 weeks after the last update. And I still haven't written about the many Christmas celebrations and baby's first New Years. I've decided to start with the inauguration, and think I'll link most of the pictures to my Picasa account instead of trying to put them here.

I like to think we did inauguration-lite. No outside standing in the cold for hours for us. Chad's college friend Nicole had reservations at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant The Source in the Newseum, a museum on Pennsylvania Ave. in DC. She called the weekend before and asked if we wanted to join her - Chad had been pretty uninspired about going, but this was an invitation that could not be refused.

So we got up at 5:15 am on Tuesday, January 20th and made our way to the RI Metro stop. Little to no traffic on the BW Parkway heading down. We got the last spot in the lot after Chad sweet talked the manager into letting us into the lot. He directed us to a half spot where we ended up on the curb (see photo of this in the album).

We walked to Nicole's and hung out there for a few hours and watched the people standing on the mall freezing and realized we had made the right decision not take Ripley out in the cold for that long since she was just coming off some lung gunk. We took a bus downtown, did some walking and ended up at the restaurant right as the swearing in ceremony was about to start. We finally made our way through the mob at the Newseum and watched Obama take the oath on the TV screens in the bar. For the sake of full disclosure, I have to say that they would not turn on the sound, so when I say we watched it, this is accurate.

We headed up for our lunch reservation and had a leisurely time enjoying good food and good company. Ripley was an angel through the meal - eating, sleeping and playing without one bit of ruckus. At one point, I thought I saw Wolfgang Puck, but no one else had, but we asked the waiter and sure enough, it was him. We were good about not being stalkers, but at the end of our meal, he came over to us and we had to ask if we could take Ripley's picture with him (see photo on Picasa). He said he has a 2 year old that he could hook her up with!

After lunch, we went outside and tried to catch a glimpse of the parade through the glass windows of the restaurant and the barricades. I did have a good view of the car, but the Obamas were not walking when they passed where we were.

Our final stop of the day was to meet up with Drew, Naya and Cai who had been out on the mall in the cold and had come all the way from Los Angeles for the event. We didn't have nearly enough time to catch up but I am so glad the little ones got to see each other. They had both been troopers all day long. We headed home around 6:00 and were once again lucky in that we hit very little traffic. We have wonderful memories of an amazing historic event - it will be fun to share them with Ripley when she is older and can truly understand the significance of the day.

Thanks for reading the long update - I'll try to get back to Christmas over the weekend.