The AP reports that at least 1,000 people didn’t make it. I’d conservatively put it a 3 to 5 times that. The AP also reports that the police said some people were moved to another gate because of crowd danger. Again, looking back at my Twitter posts, we were in a large, tight-quartered, pushy crowd for at least an hour and a  half.

I spoke with the Louisville, Ky bureau of the AP and was told the president of the University of Tennessee was turned away as well…

Amazing.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Inauguration Day turned out to be a disappointment for at least 1,000 people who held tickets to the swearing-in at the U.S. Capitol but couldn’t get in.

Jay Mayfield of Knoxville, Tenn., missed the ceremony at the Capitol despite arriving in Washington at least four hours before the swearing-in ceremony.

Mayfield and others went to the location indicated on their purple tickets, but were unable to enter. He said there were no volunteers to assist them, and police would not explain what was going on.

Mayfield says he was looking forward to the event and is very disappointed.

U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said in an e-mail that certain ticketholders who hadn’t been screened for the swearing-in ceremony were rerouted to avoid having an overflow crowd that could have created a risk to public safety.

The Washington Post is reporting on the ticket troubles today… At 11:35 the head of the Capitol Police said everyone with tickets got in.

After 1 p.m. he reversed his position.  I’m not exaggerating when I say thousands of people didn’t get.

What’s disturbing is the officers on the scene did not think to send messages up the chain of command letting their superiors know there was a problem…

Maybe I’m wrong but it certainly appeared they could have let some of the blue ticket holders go through the Orange line to help.   What’s really scary is the chief says the silver tickets had the hardest time. I can’t believe that.

I don’t mean to beat up on the police. Their first job was to protect the president and that was done well but it was so crushing to so many people not getting in…

I personally asked an officer to get some help but he didn’t recognize the need.

The crowd cheered each shot of Obama and we cheered the UT marching band.

The disappoinment from this morning lingers, one of the CNN talking heads talked about how well organized the event was. May have been, but not from where I was sitting.

Near the end, when it became apparent to all that we weren’t getting in, there was a boy- probably 6 or 7 – sitting on his dad’s shoulders. He didn’t cry. He strained through binoculars to see what he could.

He told his dad he wished they could get closer.

“We were here son,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”

A surprising number of ticket holders took that same attitude but I’ll admit it was a somewhat sullen walk back to the metro as people tried to deconstruct what went wrong. A lady on the Metro just kept saying “I don’t understand.”

I haven’t heard the whole speech yet, CNN is bantering whether or not it was a good speech. I liked what I did hear, but I’ll look it up online and watch the whole thing soon.

We  met a couple from Alaska while in the crush of people trying to get in. They didn’t get in either. I keep thinking about the guy, how frustrating it must have been to have come all that.

No inaugual balls for us tonight. We’re planning to close our trip at a seafood place in town and then, finally get some sleep.

I want to thank everyone who came by and checked out this blog. I had a lot of fun doing it. 

I’m sorry that we didn’t come through in the end.

Trying to bounce back from the morning disaster. We’re going to watch some of the parade… on the hotel TV.

I’ve spent the past three hours breaking down in my mind what went wrong, what we could have done differently.  Not much…

The level of disorganization was appalling. Not that officers didn’t have a tough job but we needed some traffic cops and it was evident by 8:15 that there was real trouble.

The crowd, it had to be thousands, collapsed into one massive line, but there was mass confusion.

Rumors came down the line that there were problems with metal detectors but who knows. The Orange line, which was right next to us appeared to open earlier than ours and ran easily through the morning.

Maybe I should have pulled out of line earlier, but the crush of people pretty much had us pinned. By the time we worked our way to the edge, it was too late.

Robb Neil and his wife Liz, both had blue tickets and got there earlier than we did, he got in shortly before 10, I think.  We never got close.

We could see the capitol and some of the dias, we could hear the roar of the crowd and hear faint strains of the band. We were there when Barack Obama was sworn in, just  couldn’t hear it or see it.

We talked about trying to get to the parade but we were on the wrong side of the mall, meaning 1.5 million people had the head start on us and many others went straight to the parade route to get seats.

At the beginning of this blog we said no whining, no special access and we got what we said we wanted, an adventure just not the ending we wanted.

We may load back up and hit some of the museums in a little bit, but we needed to thaw and shake off the disappointment.

Now we’re getting a little excitement. A half-giddy young woman from L.A. and her sister just pulled into the starting to fill parking lot. She knocked on the winder, made me jump a bit, and asked if she was in the right place.

I’m the guy to ask? I almost drove to West Virginia last night for what should have been a six-minute jaunt to the restaurant.

The lady was almost hyper, maybe it was morning coffee, which Leslie keeps reminding me she missed. Not my fault, should have taken the hotel coffee rather than gambling on a Starbucks.

About 25 people just marched in front of the car heading to the station, probably time to queue up.

The metro stations are quickly jamming with people, the happy newsman showed us when we woke up this morning.  A jaunty weatherman explained that the people already filling the national mall had better be in layers. We are in layers, lots and lots of layers, like an onion or even better a parfait.

The anchor reported Barack Obama will speak for about 20 minutes… will it be worth it? I think so.

Aretha Franklin is scheduled to sing. I’m jazzed about that. I’ve been watching the Blues Brothers for 25 years, I’d give quite a bit of money if  she’d sing “Think” and some of the cabinet members would do Jake and Elwood’s backing part and dance. That dance still makes me laugh every time I see it.

Yo Yo Ma is also scheduled to perform, but I wonder how well the cello will hold up in the cold. Hard to dress a cello in layers.

The reverend giving the final prayer, is supposed to be Joseph Lowery.  I think I’ve met him. I know I met his wife when I was in Selma, she came to the big celebration every year.

We’re sitting in the still sleeping burg of Germantown, though from the parts I saw, there wasn’t much German about it.

You have to weave through an upscale residential community to get to the station, I’m sure 20 years ago it was all farmland as the cabbie told us yesterday when we went through another upscale development.

It”s a proper winter scene at the station with snow covering everything that’s not asphalt. There’s a policeman sitting in his car by the curve at the other end of the station.  I wonder if they’ve stationed a policeman at every station or is that’s just a good place to catch speeders.

At our end, the only other car in the lot is aggressively into the corner, the little parking space lines are ignored. The lights are on and it looks like the owner is ready to jet at a moments notice. If the car was cooler and the guy revving his engine, I’d say it looks like something out of the movie “Christine.” But the car’s kinda lame and the guy probably just wants to be able to see the Germantown station.

The station itself isn’t much more than a well-decorated shotgun house. It does look slightly European with not much cover for waiting on our train which is supposed to be here in about an hour… Only the porta-john breaks the quaint little rail-travel vibe but I imagine under the right set of circumstances that’s the most welcome part of the station.

They said to be here half an hour early but after getting lost last night, I figured it was better not to chance it.

Don’t forget the Twitter link at the right is where I’ll be updating from the Capitol- if the network can handle all the traffic. Seems like that’s a big worry for the phone companies. 

You can watch the inauguration live at two of the links on the right. The one that says “live” let’s you see the straight feed from several points in the Capitol… it’s like your the producer.

Try shouting “camera a! Now B” while you’re at your cubicle just like they do when they do the live look-ins at the Oscars. That’ll go over big.