Women's March on Raleigh January 21, 2017

'I marched with my family in Raleigh, and I  found my parents run-away cat.

I went to the march with the idea that I would see other people I knew, I knew several other people going, not including the air horn people who I assumed would be there and I figured I would see. I also figured that I would be able to see them because there wouldn't be that many people there because this is Raleigh after all, I mean come on, how many people would possibly show up. I've been to many protests here and frankly, Raleigh is not a big protest town. It throws a lot of protests but the attendance rate is not great. But then Trump got elected and the times are not normal.

Sunday, while I was a Lowes doing some grocery shopping a girl who came up to me because she saw the Hillary sticker on my car in the parking lot ,  told me 30K was the final count.  We had a quick bonding session because we were both there and that was fun, she told me there was another march on Feb. 11, I also got a flyer for that one but hadn't thought about going, maybe I will. Note to self, get pussy hat prior to march.

I thought there were a lot of folks at the march, we were walking up the street and there were all these other people also walking up the street and I was "Wow, there are going to be a turn out for this, how neat!" and then we got to a stopping place and lo and behold, we were several blocks from the place we were supposed to be because there were so many people already there. Thousands of people already there.

I saw that it was thought to be about 17K, I saw a report on my phone while we were still at the march that gave the attendance number and it seemed like a good figure on  Saturday while it was still happening, but that was preliminary . That seemed like a really big number to me. Later on they revised the figure upward and they were saying 20K but, people were still streaming in even as we were leaving so the 30K number could be good.  The people just kept streaming in! So many people! We were leaving and new people just kept streaming in.

We were leaving we had been there for a couple of hours at least, the signs are the crowds of people streaming in from Fayetteville Street hours after the march started. The cars are parked because they could not pass due to the sheer number of pedestrians.

It felt like 30K. I really did think that it was going to be just a handful of people and I was going to be able to easily find my friends and we would all have lunch together! I didn't even bother to set up any kind of meet up because why bother? We would be able to see each other, I had no idea it was going to be like that. And by "that" I mean shoulder-to-shoulder-across-the-street-for-blocks-we-got-there-late-and-we-were-among-the-first-to-Moore Square-and-we-still-could-not-even-see-or-hear-the-speakers. We were pretty sure that there were speakers but we were never sure if they were speaking or why periodically we all got very excited. We did a lot of cheering and chanting. Chanting is fun.