What’s Up With Chuck?

Last week, I spent 3 days away from home because of the inauguration.  This first post of the year will describe the trip in a little bit of detail.

I’m the operations manager for a group travel company in Savannah, GA.  We took 10 busses filled with 500 people to DC for the big day.  Everybody left from Savannah on Monday and all but one returned straight home on Tuesday after the inauguration (one spent the night and returned home the next day).

My Monday began with a 3 am wake up and a large cup of coffee on the way in to the office.  I got to work at 4 am to begin overseeing the loading of busses and making sure the right people got on the right bus.  Out of the ten busses, only 4 loaded at the office, which was a good thing.  With no major mixups or delays to speak of, everybody got out of town on on time.

Once the busses were gone, my director of sales, the office newbie and myself got in the staff van and got headed up the road.  Four of our busses were headed for Richmond, Virginia and the other six were going to Williamsburg.  We got to Richmond and unloaded my two passengers along with their supplies and then I got going down the road to Williamsburg.

At my hotel, I had to arrange one of the busses to run shuttle service from the hotel into Colonial Williamsburg, coordinate the dinner at the hotel and also the DJ and party that evening after the dinner.  All of this was done beforehand, but had to be overseen as it happened.  Everything happened smoothly enough but when you’ve got 300 people calling your phone and stopping you in the hall every single moment from 5 pm - 9pm, it gets old quickly!

Tuesday morning was a very early morning.  Breakfast was served at 3 am and we pulled out of the parking lot at 4 am.  All six busses were loaded and left….on time.  Wow.  As we left, it began to snow, which was beautiful!  There was much less traffic going into DC than we expected.  It helped that they closed I-395 and downtown to all traffic other than busses.  We didn’t hit any traffic riding into town in the HOV lane until we reached the 14th street bridge, which is in town past the pentagon….so that was great!  One thing that was not great was the fact that the ten parking spaces we paid for were not available.  When the city made the decision to open the city to motor coaches and close it to private vehicular traffic, they also decided to completely close off certain streets and make them “parking lots”.

Well, it took an hour to get all ten busses parked throughout the city and, needless to say, we were not all together.  It all ended up working out okay, although it was extremely aggrivating.

All of the busses were parked by 8 am and that gave a good amount of time before the ceremony began.  The city was extremely crowded but it was extraordinarily well organized.  If people were intelligent enough to read and/or listen, it would have been even easier on everybody there.

I ended up on Independence and 3rd, on the corner by the National Museum of Native American History and headed stayed there for a while taking pictures.  After a while, I got tired of taking the same pictures from the same angle, so I started following the crowd travelling north on 3rd streeet.  Once I had travelled with the crowd far enough that it would have been nearly impossible to have turned around, people started whipping out tickets.  This concerned me.  In any case, once we rounded the corner of Jefferson and Third.  There were security checkpoints all along the south side of the mall between third and fourth streets.  I asked the TSA screening agent “What would one do if they just followed the crowd and did not have a ticket?”  The screening agent told me not to worry about it…that they had stopped keeping people out a while ago.  Whew!!

So, I ended up in the middle of the National Mall in the first section, between 3rd and 4th streets.  It was awesome!  I took plenty of pictures but the down side is that many of them were repetitive due to my location.  I got a spot standing on a park bench, which gave me an excellent view, so I stayed there for an hour and watched the ceremony.

One thing that really disappointed me/surprised me/angered me was, when dignitaries were making their entrance to the stage at the Capitol, the group of classless people around me boo-ed President Bush, Sr. and boo-ed Laura Bush.  Then President Bush made his entrance, there were boos mixed with “nah nah, na na  nah-nah; hey hey hey, goodbye”.  This struck me as completely classless and angered me.  It just seemed to me that anyone so classless to do such a thing, didn’t deserve to be in DC among all of the history.

Please understand that I’m not a whiny Republican that’s upset because a democrat won.  Nor am I a racist that’s upset that a half-black man is now the President.  What angers me is that, whether you like the holder of the office or not, that person is still the President of the United States of America….the Chief Executive and the Commander-in-Chief of our nation’s military forces.  If you don’t have respect for the office, then why are you even at the inauguration?!

Anyhow….the lack of class exhibited by those people was annoying.  On the way out of the Mall area, there was a huge logjam….oh, because there were TWO MILLION people there.  Many people in the crowd offered their opinions on why the crowd wasn’t moving or how stupid that was.  It didn’t exhibit a lack of class, but was annoying nonetheless.  I guess people got tired of waiting and started tearing down the chain link fence that lined the south side of Jefferson so they could bypass the line that was over a half block in front of us.  The rude comments continued to fly when President Bush left the ceremony in Marine One.  Again, this is no attack on anybody’s political views….it’s an attack on their complete lack of class or respect.

Once the crowd starting moving from the mall, it was slow going back to the bus.  The day was well organized, but even so, you put two million people anywhere and it’s not going to be easy.  Once we got hthe busses loaded, everybody headed back to Richmond.  We used a mall there to stop the busses for dinner.  It was staggered enough, based on the time that everyone left, that it worked well.  After the last bus was all set to go, my director of sales, another employee and myself took control of the Staff Vehicle and went to get some dinner of our own!  As soon as we were done eating, we found a place to crash and left the drive home for the next day.  That turned out to be great, because we got a chance to stop and play in the snow!

So, there it is, a first hand account of the Inauguration.  The whole day was fine but years from now, I will not remember the flubbed swearing in ceremony, the inauguration speech or the quartet playing along to recorded music.  Nope, what I will remember is the lack of class shown by a bunch of people that think, for some reason, America is a better place than it was the day before based on who won the election, or by who left office.  People that think, because of who won the election that they, themselves, are somehow “more” American than they were the day before.  These people are the lowest common denominator.  These people are the ones that voted for change and aren’t even well informed enough to know what change they voted in.  They think the change meant a black man….they never bothered to find out what that half-black man even stands for.  Remember people like this as our country moves in whatever direction it goes the next four years.

I pray that our nation will prosper and continue to be blessed.  I pray that our new President will seek first the guidance of God and that he will lead the United States in a way that all Americans can be proud of.