Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had been hinting at doing some sort of rally in DC. Mostly in opposition to the crazy bickering going on for the upcoming midterm elections. As you can imagine, there is a pretty large following for these two. And there are plenty sick of the politics. What better way than to have a little rally?
So yeah, the Shady Grove Metro station was a little bit crowded. Since I forgot to refill my SmartTrip card, I was there, waiting with everyone. And really, I was surprised at how many people were from Pennsylvania. Sure they seemed to be near the PA/MD border, but I guess it hadn’t really sunk in that a ton more people from outside the DC metro area would be there. It was a good hour or so wait if I recall. My friend who was coming showed up about 40 minutes into the wait, heh.
If anyone had ventured into DC for Obama’s Inauguration, you could get a sense of how it was. No one could board metro really, and quite a few took the train in the opposite direction to board on the first stop. One poor guy had no clue what was going on and was simply trying to go one stop to grab lunch! Eventually, we got off at Metro Center because I figured we could just walk to the Mall from there.
I’m a little upset I didn’t catch many ridiculous signs. Our arrival was an hour after the event started. And the crowds were thick. I believe they underestimated the number of people coming because we managed to get to the last set of speakers, and there was still a block or two of people behind it. We decided to continue our navigation game through the crowd to get to the back of the Mall in hopes of more jumbotrons, but we were greeted with a thinning crowd of people. We kind of gave up since we knew it’d probably be televised anyway. I was there to show a little support and document it really, or try to. The trip back was much easier since we beat the crowd back.
Video highlights can be found on Comedy Central (not sure where the full video might be).
Yeah, we saw him, too. Full gallery on SmugMug.