Travel Blog

• Enlarge

Category: Seeing the U.S.A.

Presidential inaugurations then and now

Watching all the Obama-travelers smiling even as they shivered on the Washington Mall today made me recall my first trip to Washington, D.C., 36 years ago for a very different kind of presidential inauguration.

We'd driven all night from Ann Arbor in a borrowed bread van to protest the re-inauguration of President Richard M. Nixon as he began his second term. The mood was different then, angry and tense, colored by the Vietnam War and the creeping stain of Watergate that soon would envelop the country.

What I remember most, beyond anti-war protesters carrying a burning effigy of Nixon down Pennsylvania Avenue, is how freezing cold it was -- way colder than today, something like minus 20-degree windchill.

The other thing I remember is that while our six travel companions, all college students like us, chose to stay inside, I dragged my boyfriend, Steve, all over town seeing the Capitol sites, despite the bone-chilling cold. I remember declaring, "I didn't drive all the way to Washington D.C. to not see anything!"

And, though I didn't realize it at the time, that 1973 roadtrip was not only the dawning of my interest in travel writing but also the cementing of our relationship: Steve and I have been married now for more than 35 years.