D.C. locals flee Washington before inauguration

As the pilgrimage to Washington begins, when spectators from all over the world flock to Capitol Hill in the hope of capturing a glimpse of history-in-the-making, the Beckman family will be hightailing it out of town.

They will be part of a reverse migration of inaugural refugees, locals simultaneously repelled from the American capital by the congestive hazards of millions of spectators and lured by the promise of rental income and vacation discounts the week of president-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in as the 44th president of the United States.

"I was so gung-ho, and I was such an Obama supporter and I was thinking about volunteering for the inauguration, and then I thought though it would be so fun, it would be once in a lifetime, being from this area I'm kind of crowd-adverse," said Yael Beckman, a real estate broker who lives in Crofton, Md., with her husband and two young daughters.

"So I was thinking maybe it's just best to stay away and enjoy it all from the comfort of a TV."

So the Beckmans have instead decided to rent out their home, a colonial-style four-bedroom house located about 20 minutes from downtown Washington, for $500 a night, and visit family in Annapolis.

By all estimates, Obama's inauguration will attract a crowd of unprecedented size to an event of unprecedented significance. Fewer than half-a-million people attended George W. Bush's inauguration in 2005, and the most modest estimates predict more than 1.5 million people will crowd the National Mall, an open-area park in downtown Washington, on Inauguration Day.

Road and bridge closings, crashing cellular phone networks, thousands of high-demand porta-potties and intense security are in the offing.

Kelly Ross is an Obama supporter who lives close to the Pentagon. She is still deciding whether she'd rather spend inauguration weekend in either Richmond or Roanoke, Va.

"D.C. can get very crowded, but this is unprecedented," she said. "I don't think they realize what's going to happen here."

Ross is familiar with the contagion of Obama-mania that has gripped the United States, and she said she wouldn't be surprised if crowds exceeded even the highest estimates of five million.

"The Mall in itself can contain two million people and they're expecting five. That in itself doesn't sound appealing to me, so I'm going to try and stay away from there," she said.

She, too, is renting out her home, a one-bedroom apartment with views of the downtown skyline available for $500.

According to Edith Grossman, a travel agent at Circle Travel in Washington, many locals are avoiding and profiting from the inauguration chaos by renting out their homes and heading south.

"A lot of them are heading to warmer destinations like Florida," she said.

And travel discounts are available to these Capitol Hill runaways.

Amelia Island Plantation, a Florida golf and tennis resort lined with five kilometers of beach, is offering a 20-per-cent D.C. Escape discount to Washington-area residents.

The resort's chief marketing officer, Richard Goldman, said he has a sister who lives in the Washington area who was concerned about the perils of commuting to work during inauguration week.

"So we put on our thinking caps and said, let's see if we can't put a program together that creates great value and gives residents who don't want necessarily to be there a reason to escape D.C. and come down to experience Amelia Island," he said.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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