The Maas Family: Hangin' with Oprah

As many of you know, wherever 100,000 or more are gathered together in Chicago, Kevin feels the need to be in their midst, so we went to the Obama rally in Grant Park last night. I am not a lover of large crowds like he is, but it was an amazing time and actually much less chaotic than I had expected. Tuesday is my late night at work, but I managed to get home by 7:30 or so. We read stories and got David to sleep. Uncle Dave held down the fort (thanks, Dave!), and we headed for the L. We had parked the car and were about to walk into the station when Kevin pulled his driver's license from his pocket and it snapped in half. Weird. Since a photo ID was required to get into the rally (the tickets were issued in Kevin's name) and we weren't sure if the Secret Service would accept half a driver's license as identification, we had to go back to the house and grab his passport. Eventually we made it downtown and found our way through the 3 security checks into the rally. Surprisingly, we were nowhere near Oprah.
The walk to Grant Park was an experience in and of itself. There were people everywhere selling Obama gear. Lots of people, including Kevin, were checking their phones for updates and celebrating every time a state turned blue. We got to Grant Park around 9:15, in plenty of time to see Virginia called for Obama and count down (literally) until the polls closed in California and he was officially the president-elect. Clearly after 12 years, Kevin is rubbing off on me because I have to say that Chicago looked amazing. The weather was uncharacteristically lovely (20 degrees above average). The buildings were lit up red, white and blue. Everywhere you looked, there was a sea of very happy people. We watched the speech on the jumbotron (Obama himself was teeny tiny and far far away) and stayed until the whole thing was over. We made it home by 12:30ish, much earlier than I had anticipated. We were very tired this morning, but definitely worth it to have been there for such an historic moment for our country. Way cool.

Kevin (and lots of other people) at the rally. Our view of the big screen.