Well, it took me awhile to look through everyone elses pics, and all I can say is I am SO completely blown away. When my husband, son, and I were there, we knew there were A LOT of people (we guessed 30,000 - LOL) but we had no idea there were as many as close to 75,0000!!.
It's true what they say that you can't see the forest for the trees, especially at my height of 5' 2".
We arrived at about 10:45am, parked in a covered lot (we were lucky) and started looking for the end of the line. I think we walked between 6-8 blocks before we finally arrived at our waiting place (see last image to get a lay of the land).
Here's my pics (old camera), 15 in all, with one map -->
First off, my apologies to those on dial-up for the number of pics. I hope you can see at least a few of them.
Walking with group to our waiting spot:
Arriving at security entrance around 12:45pm (somewhere around that time):
Hawthorne Bridge in the distance, and only some of the boats (man did I want to go swimming) that were actually there:
Some of the crowd in our location. The woman in the foreground (beige hat and blue jacket) was grading what looked like middle school papers.
Rep Earl Blumenauer (OR-3) - My district (I'm so proud of him):
Crowd that was behind where we stood. I have my arms up in the air with the camera, and kept my fingers crossed that I could get as many in the pic as was possible:
Here's a pic of my husband Victor, and my son, Aaron (first time voter). I had to crop it, and you don't want to know why. lol (Have to clean my camera lense - damn spot right on Aaron's gorgeous face)
Victor and I. Gawd I hate pics of me.
Another crowd pic behind us, but a bit more to the right of the one above:
Another one behind, but to the left of us - I got a bit bored, and had plenty of disk space left. :o)
The Obama First Family FINALLY arrives!
Obama again (at my eye level) - He actually looked a bit closer. I don't know why cameras make them look even further away:
And again (my arms stretch as high as I could, on tippy-toe):
Crowd behind us beginning to disperse. Took about 30 mins to travel around 50 yards and out of the park:
And just for an overview of the downtown area (courtesy Google) here's the route we walked from our waiting spot up top to the entrance of Waterfront Park (I may be wrong on one or two of the streets, but it was an 8-block long distance that we snaked around).
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the bigger red rectangle is about where I think the stage was and the 3 smaller red rectangles are about where we were.
So, that's it. We are just THRILLED to have been a part of history. If you were there, I'm sure you feel exactly the same way we do!
PS: Thanks for the REC. I'm so glad you enjoyed these. You LIKE him, you really, REALLY, LIKE HIM!! :o)