Official and other estimates for crowd and attendance numbers range from 10,000 – 25,000 and none of those estimates surprise me. From the stage on one end of the Mall to the exhibit tents on the other and well onto both sides of the service roads it was packed. The speaker lineup was amazing and they were all inspiring, but I would have to say that the best acts would have had to have been Jessica Alhquist, Tim Minchin, and Eddie Izzard.

The balance of styles was quite nice from the humanists who focused on playing nice to the firebrands (PZ Myers, Greta Christina, et al) telling us to embrace our rage, from encouraging us to come out of the atheist closet and get involved with the movement to standing up for our rights and protect our secular government from theocratic incursion.

It’s hard to put into words how incredible of an experiance (although I need to be able to by next weekend), but to be in a crowd of that many godless heathens, so see our resolve not hampered by the rain, to see Dave Silverman, Todd Stiefel, Richard Dawkins, and Eddie Izzard challenge and entertain us while soaking wet, and to have the crowd join Tim Minchin in singing about how much we all love boobs…just awesome.

Then there were the afterparties…but I probably shouldn’t go into the fuzzy details.

I’ll post some videos when some higher quality clips are available.