11.24.2010

To the Rally...

Even though work has been super busy (unfortunately I expect that to continue for a little bit over the next couple of months), I’ve found some limited time to squeeze out another blog entry. As my topic this month, I have chosen a familiar theme for long time readers...the trials and tribulations of getting around DC. This time it involved getting to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Our story begins early Saturday morning. Several of us were planning on attending the rally, but there were some complicating factors. Our distinguished guests (Traci, Cassie, and Shannon, or “Trassinon”) were in town for the Halloween party, but had other brunch plans that morning before the rally. The first "Oh S@!t" moment occurred as I was dropping the brunch-goers at Vienna Metro. The line wrapped out of the fare gates all the way across 66 into the kiss and ride drop off point (if you haven’t been to the Vienna Metro, take my word for it that it’s a long freaking way). Luckily, I did remember that during big events, like the annual Cherry Blossom festival, the line is just for the fare card machines and not to actually get on the train. Unfortunately, not all of our guests had a fare card, so back to the house we went to scrounge for extra fare cards. Fortunately, we found a few extras that we could use and headed out again for trip #2 to the Metro. I wished them luck and made tentative plans to try to meet up at the rally (foolish though they were) and headed back to the house to pick the second crew (myself, Sarah, Sarah #2, Rob, Mike #2, and Amanda). We would never see the brunch goers again…at least until I had to pick them up from the Vienna Metro yet again much later that afternoon.

We strategized for a bit and thought that maybe Dunn Loring would be a little less chaotic than Vienna, so we decided to head that way. We were dead wrong. The Dunn Loring line was just as long, if not longer, and went around the block to the street. We took one of the few remaining parking spaces and headed to the station. There was something strangely satisfying in walking past the huge line for the farecard machines and walking right up to the deserted fare gates and into the station.

Our next challenge was getting on the train. We had some seasoned Metro goers in the group so we immediately headed to the very end of the tracks to get on the first car. The train was packed, but the first car actually had some room. This didn't mean that people were filling in the middle yet, but we were able to all squeeze on. The next several metro stops were like a game of Tetris...how many more people could squeeze into an already packed car. It was a good thing the general mood of the crowd was much different than a typical rush hour commute. People were generally jovial and entertaining; trading stories of how they got there, joking around about restoring sanity, and hitting on Rob’s wife. As the Metro Tetris game continued, our party ended up getting pushed into different parts of the car. Being freakishly tall, I had to serve as the chief communication link between everyone. At least one person decided, let’s just get out once we hit the district and walk the rest of the way. So, we escaped the sardine can and started the long walk to the mall.

We ended up arriving at the rally right around 12:00. The crowds were enormous and pretty soon we arrived at a logjam. People stretched way beyond the limits of the area set aside for the rally. Portions of the mall were blocked off, forcing everyone to squeeze into the walkways. People completely covered the roads and were starting to climb on anything they could: trees, street lights, and even the port-a-potties. Although it was crowded the many clever signs and costumes more than made up for it:

“Keep your hands off my Third Amendment Rights, No Soldiers Quartered in MY house"

“Don’t Blame Me I voted for Kodos”

"If a riot breaks out I'm grabbing an I-Pad"

“Hitler was a Nazi”





The Street Next to the Mall - Notice the Person on the Traffic Light

The camaraderie with the crowd was definitely fun, but it was very tough to actually hear or see the rally. Jon Stewart and the music generally came through pretty good, but not having the visuals made it pretty hard to understand what was going on and other speakers were much quieter. We didn’t get any visuals of the classic Stephen Colbert outfits, and were mostly confused with the Peace Train/Crazy Train bit. At that point we figured we had really seen all that we could see and decided to make our way around the back of the rally toward the Capitol and head to the Metro. We figured the DVR of the rally would make a whole lot more sense. Although Mike was really pushing to just go to Churchkey instead of heading back to the infamous Blades and Booze Halloween party, we ended up making the last, much less crowded portion of our journey and drove out to the far West of Northern Virginia.

I definitely thought it was a fun and cool experience, much more about the journey than the actual destination, but I do have some complaints. Comedy Central, your estimates were way off. I’ll even put you “On Notice.” I know these things are hard to estimate, but you were off by a factor of four (60k vs 220k) and that doesn’t include all the people who basically got stranded trying to get there. Here is aerial photo of the event, which you can see extends well beyond the original space:




The crowds ended up being about the same number of people as a normal DC workday. Transporting that many people just doesn’t work with 12 minute intervals between trains. As I understand it, Metro’s policy is not to run more trains unless the organizers of an event ask for expanded service and pay to provide it. You should have ponied up Comedy Central, it just wasn’t working.

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