Obama Rally

This morning, Travis and I woke up briiiiight and early (4 am) and headed north.  What, might you ask, possessed us to get up so crazy early in the morning?  Saturday night, we realized that not one...but TWO Presidents were going to be in New Hampshire Sunday morning!  I've never seen a President before, so we were really excited to go!

Thankfully, the rally fell on Daylight Savings weekend, so we were still able to get 6.5 hours of sleep.  

The rally was in Concord, NH.  "Doors" opened at 7am, and Presidents Clinton and Obama were set to go on around 10.  Our tickets directed us to a park & ride situation the volunteers had set up a few miles from the center of town.  We got there and waited in our first (of many) lines of the day.  It was 40 degrees and  barely light outside, but we were excited!

We were so naive.  We got on the school bus...feeling good about where we would stand in line to see the Pres's.  Oh...how wrong we were!  When the bus drove into downtown (at about 6:30am), there was already a line of people a half a mile long.  So...we hopped on the end and waited some more!

We finally  made it to security and into the podium area...where again...we waited for things to begin.  Thankfully Ann, Terence and husband are awesome, so it was a lot of fun!

As we stood there, waiting for the rally to begin, we realized we were NOT alone!  We'd seen a lot of secret service members on the way in, but as time went on, we spotted several on the rooftops around us.  I'm sure there were many more that were hidden...such a crazy thing to be surrounded by!

Those aren't guitars on their backs...

Thanks for keeping us safe while we were there, police/secret service (wo)men!

After some singing from a Dartmouth a cappella group and several speeches from local governing figures, out came the Presidents!  

Dartmouth group

Obama!

There were SO many people at the rally (when we came home, we read online that over 14,000 people showed up).  I was so impressed how nicely everyone was getting along!  After 6 hours of lines/waiting scrunched together, I didn't see or hear one angry thing.  Everyone was just REALLY happy to be there - such a fun day!  It was also really nice to hear a speech without it fading into someone's ridiculous political commentary for a change.  :)

After the rally, we knew the lines to get back on the buses would be insanely long, so we found a (crappy) place to eat lunch first.  Then we waited in yet another long line to get back to our car.  

We landed back home around 3:30pm.  Travis and I ended the day by watching the new(ish) movie, The Campaign, which was really funny.  Overall...it was a (really) long, fun, and inspiring day!