adelheid_p | Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear experience

On Saturday,

dergeis and I attended the Rally for Sanity. We had kind of waffled about the idea of driving down and back in one day but then a friend of ours noted on Facebook that a local talk show host, Lynn Cullen had contacted a local bus company and they offered to drive down provided they got enough interest. The problem was that the deadline to reserve was noon on Friday and I didn't see this post until after work. Still, my friend said to call so I called on Friday, October 22 to see if they had seats left and they had enough interest to extend their deadline until Monday. I reserved right there for the two of us. The person who took my reservation said that I should receive an e-mail with instructions for sending payment by Wednesday ($55 per person or $110 for the two of us). I waited and checked my e-mail but never received instructions. I called and left a message Tuesday night but got no call back on Wednesday. I called Thursday morning and the person answering the phone confirmed that we had reserved seats and gave me the place to send payment and who to make the check out to. I dropped a check in the mail to them that day. Thursday night I received an e-mail from the bus person with our seat confirmation. We were leaving at 6 am from a shopping center about 10 minutes from our house.

We also made tentative plans to meet up with a friend of my husband's who was going separately and then friends of mine from an online radio community named Bomb-Shelter-Radio since the host and many others lived in the area.

The day before there was some Twitter discussion about bringing food to pass around and when we discussed this, my husband thought we should have tea party there. So, on Saturday, we got up a little after 5 am and started water boiling. I made green tea and decaf ginger-peach flavored black tea in two separate thermoses. I also grabbed a bag of Stacey's Garlic Parmesan flavored pita chips and a bag of onion-pumpernickel pretzels because they were both handy. I had set up my belt pouch the night before with my wallet, etc. And I put on a light zippered hooded sweatshirt and we headed out to the bus boarding location. We got there in 5 minutes because next to no one is out and about that early on Saturday and boarded the bus with no problems. Not to long after that, we set out. Our first stop was a McDonald's in Breezewood, PA for breakfast. We arrived at about 9 am and were apparently the first bus of 8 of the group leaving from our area to arrive.

Unfortunately, they were not prepared for us with only one staff member on the register plus the front manager and it took a while to get our food but they worked as quickly as they could. We ate our breakfasts and were off to the Rosslyn, VA Metro Station which was our destination.

I think we arrived at the Metro at about 10:30 am. One of the members of our group had made 17 signs and offered them to people from the bus. We didn't take any and continued into the station. It took us at least a half an hour to get on a Metro. They ran about every ten minutes but were packed with people from earlier stations. Finally, my husband grabbed my hand and we literally squeezed on to a train. We road it until the L'Enfant Plaza station where we got off and walked over to the rally point. There were volunteers who directed us there and, of course, various street merchants selling all kinds of t-shirts, buttons and lanyard tags. My husband purchased a button from one of them. We passed by a blue painted school bus that said it had come from Florida for the rally. There were lots of people everywhere but everyone seemed to be cheerful.

We knew the location of my husband's friends and tried to make it there by going down 7th St. NW but were pretty much stopped in the middle by the press of people right about noon and stopped there for a bit and listened to the opening bits with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert up until after the "I'm More American Than You" bit. (Videos from the rally can be seen here.) There were people as far as the eye could see and it became clear that it would be nearly impossible to hook up with anyone we had planned to see. So we broke out of that crowd by following an emergency vehicle back toward Jefferson Drive in front of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. We wandered down Jeffersion Dr. taking pictures until we got close to 4th St NW and people were saying that the street was closed off. So we turned around wandered back down toward the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum entrance and listened to the rest of the performances until the end. dergeis had wanted to see some portion of the museum but there was quite a line to get in and we gave up on that idea and instead hung out on the steps of the museum for a while until the crowd dispersed a bit and then wandered back to where we thought the Bomb Shelter Radio folks might be.

All during this I was impressed by the good spirits of everyone and the sense of camaraderie and fun that seemed to pervade the atmosphere. We did not observe any angry exchanges. Everyone that I encountered was polite and people would stop to let you take a picture of a sign. Sometimes they cheered at people holding signs they liked, I know I did. I had decided to wear a t-shirt I had purchased earlier this month at the Conclave SF con. It was black with bright blue letters that said "I have NOT lost my mind. It's backed up on the server. And the network is down again." I got several compliments on it. When we wandered over to try to find the BSR folks, I saw people with trash bags picking up trash and people trying to clean as much up as they could what with the overflowing trash cans. In addition, during one of the times we stopped to try to listen to the programming going on, we were near a concession stand that was serving Kosher Beef Hot Dogs and Black Bean Burgers. It smelled good, and I was impressed at the seeming quality of the food, although I did not see the prices or buy any thing.

I had sent a text message to the D.J. but I later learned that his cell phone died so I should have tried to reach others but my cell phone was having problems getting any signal. We had to be back to our departure Metro stop by 4:45 pm so we headed over to the Federal Center SW Metro Station figuring we'd be able to get on a train a stop before L'Enfant Plaza. It turned out to be a very good idea, since we were both able to get a seat and I later heard that they had temporarily closed L'Enfant Plaza.

We made it back to the Rosslyn, VA Metro Station at 4:45 pm and got on the bus. We departed at 5:05 pm. We stopped at a shopping mall in Bethesda, MD for dinner and ate food court food. While we were there, we ran into my friend from Facebook who had told me about the bus trip and she briefly relayed her experience. She had managed to meet up with her friend who had a torn meniscus and could not stand for long periods. They had tried to get behind the stage and had walked for five blocks but there were still too many people to find a good place to sit so they went for lunch. Then she went back to the bus as well. She took pictures as well and showed us a few of the good ones. We got back on our buses and continued the journey home. We arrived at about 10:40 pm at our car in the shopping center parking lot and went home. My Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear Flickr Set