Rep. Rick Larsen and his family didn’t have far to walk to get to their seats Tuesday because they camped overnight in his congressional office across from the street from all the action.
“It went pretty well except the cleaning crew that kept waking me up,” he said.
Starbucks put out special coffee sleeves with red-and-blue stripes and excerpts from different presidential inaugural addresses.
We found one with words from Abraham Lincoln’s in 1865:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
And one with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous phrase in 1945:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Stars of the stage, screen, music and political words could be seen everywhere.
Josh Ogden, an Everett High School sophomore, crossed paths with Nobel Peace Prize winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Vice President Al Gore at the Presidential Youth Inaugural Conference.
And Peter Jackson, son of the late Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, reported sighting Sheryl Crow, Garrison Keillor and Tony Award-winning actor Jeffrey Wright.
And that’s before they all went to Tuesday’s night inaugural balls.
Everyone headed to the inauguration had to get an early start.
At 6 a.m., Cascade High School students were on one of a long line of buses creeping slowly toward the National Mall. Hotel rooms in D.C. were sold out and the students spent Monday night in Maryland.
Today, elements are in place for another rare moment in history.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray is offering coffee for up to 1,000 Washington residents in D.C. for the inauguration.
Serving up the joe and chatting up the folks could be the state’s entire congressional delegation. They’ve been invited and are all expected to make at least a short appearance.
Television stations in Maryland and Washington, D.C., have covered Obama’s inauguration basically nonstop for the last week. To ward off the cold, one newscaster recommended inauguration-goers wrap themselves in bubble wrap.
Cascade High School students got some good vibes flowing during Sunday’s pre-inauguration concert at the Lincoln Memorial.
As Bruce Springsteen sang “This Land is Your Land,” the 23 of them put their arms around each other and started swaying back and forth with the rhythm. Then someone from the crowd latched on.
And another. And another.
“It was so neat. It just kept getting bigger and bigger and by the end there was about 500 people,” said junior Katie Kloes.
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