We were exhausted from the start. The night before leaving we had the first full session of our Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction class (that’s worth a separate blog). So we arrived home after ten, with a lot of the packing and preparation yet to be done.
We had been collecting information in bits and dribbles for weeks. I kept a spreadsheet of events we might go to, and it filled in bit by bit, with an exact time here, a location there, and a detail on what we needed to do to get the “credentials” to get in. Up until the last few days, there were still a lot of gaps and along with them an anxiety about whether we’d actually get to the places we wanted to, at the right times, with the right tickets.
We had been warned many times that transportation would be a nightmare and that neither taxis nor the Metro could be counted on when things got crowded. Although we’re generally very happy to walk, we weren’t in great shape at the moment. I still have weakness/soreness from my ankle fracture, and an on-and-off bum knee and toe from arthritis. Carol was recovering slowly from a cold that ended up in bronchitis and some pneumonia, which left her generally weaker than her usual not-stellar shape. After consultation with various doctors, especially our pulmonologist, Andy Newman, we decided we could go, bringing along her wheelchair in case we needed to take extended walks that she couldn’t manage. It was a bit comical trying to figure out if I could manage to push the wheelchair after my recent shoulder surgery (the lame leading the blind, or something like that). In the end we figured if we were smart about how and where we used our energy, we could make it, and we certainly weren’t going to miss it. [In the end, we only used the wheelchair in airports, and except for the day of the Inaugural, transportation worked out very well].
So we left San Francisco in a state of excitement but also a bit of apprehension. The travel was generally uneventful, and the inauguration excitement began on the flight. We transferred in St. Louis, and pretty much everyone on the plane seemed to be going to the inauguration. The kind of multi-racial multi-generational group you might expect. Carol ended up talking to a frail Africa-American woman who was 86, and needed two people to help her onto the plane. She and her daughters were going to Washington even though they didn’t have tickets to any of the events. Carol said “You have a lot of courage.” She responded, smiling broadly, “If I can breathe, I have to be there.”
As we were getting into our seats, the attendant announced “Please get all of your luggage into the overhead racks and get into your seats so we can get you all to the inauguration on time.”