Breathe easy, inauguration planners: No one from Virginia is going. A sample of shoppers at Potomac Yard Retail Center in Alexandria and outdoors enthusiasts at Roosevelt Island failed to yield a single resident of the Old Dominion interested in attending the inauguration of America’s 44th president.

“It’s nothing political; it’s mostly logistical,” says Frank Willcoxon of Old Town, who was planning to walk to the celebration with his wife but decided that the restrictions on bags would make a long day out difficult. “I’m gonna be watching on TV,” said a woman who declined to give her name but who named two factors that would keep her away: “It’s cold and my daughter has asthma.”

The cold was apparently keeping folks away from Roosevelt Island today, too—after waiting in vain in the parking lot for 10 minutes with a 4-year-old concerned that we weren’t seeing enough robots, we took a walk across the river, which was mostly frozen. If you paused long enough on the bridge—say, to take a picture of the ice with your cell phone—you could hear the ice cracking punctuated by the sounds of a male and female cardinal looking for food on the mainland.
My son decided that he would like to have two pets: a dog and a cardinal, and then we got in the car and left.