I’ve had the privilege over the nearly three decades I’ve been working at Congressional Quarterly to be an observer of history being made. Maybe I’ve even had a bit role to play, as longtime participant in our coverage and handicapping of the nation’s congressional and presidential races.

One piece of history that I’ve personally gotten to experience is the meteoric rise of the political phenomenon named Barack Obama . Curious in July 2004 about this rising star who was favored to win a Senate seat in Illinois, I went into the arena in Boston where he was delivering the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention and saw the gifted orator electrify the audience.

Then, this past August, I trudged along in a queue with tens of thousands of others on a very hot day, headed into Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium — I to cover the final day of the Democratic National Convention, they to cheer Obama as he became the first African-American to win a major party’s presidential nomination.

I’ve often said that the procession in Denver felt as close to a pilgrimage as anything I’d experienced. But having sworn an oath of professional detachment to which I’ve adhered for all these years, it was a pilgrimage in which I was an observer and not a participant.

So I decided on Monday, as my hometown of Washington geared up for Obama’s inauguration the next day as the nation’s 44th president, to conduct a little pilgrimage of my own, taking a very long walk to visit familiar but never outdated touchstones of our American experiment in democracy.

I again shared the moment with thousands who had come to honor and show their support for Obama, with full cognizance of the historical significance of his emergence as president.

The Lincoln Memorial seemed the appropriate starting point, as it pays tribute to the president who prosecuted the Union cause in the Civil War and ended the enslavement of blacks in America. It also is the place where, a mere 45 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — whose life is marked by an annual holiday that fell on Monday — spoke of fulfilling a dream of full equality long withheld from his fellow black Americans, and ultimately paved the way for the election of a Barack Obama as president.

But the trek was more about different kinds of grandeur: of a peaceful transition of power still not available to many of the world’s people; of those millions of average Americans who so often have striven in their own ways to defend and protect the United States and to build a more perfect union; and a city that is home to a federal government that sometimes goes astray, but which always enshrines what is best about this country.

The next stop was the most personal: the still relatively new memorial to those who served in World War II. My father, who would have turned 91 last Thursday had time not caught up with him last May, was one of them, a navigator who flew three dozen missions over Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the names of the epic ground battles etched into the marble is the understated inscription, “Air War in Europe.” I took a photograph of it.

My father and mother, who died three years ago, were liberal Democrats of modest means and Jewish heritage who lived in New York City and one of its less-upscale suburbs. They were Real Americans.

From the World War II monument, it was a walk across the street to the Washington Monument, to remember the general turned first president and the others who risked their lives 230 years ago to make this exercise in self-governance possible. At the crest of the hill surrounding the towering obelisk, the Capitol — a place that has absorbed most of my adult life because of my odd choice of professions — came into unobstructed view.

The closer you approached, the more you could see the flags and folding seats and other trappings of the ceremony in which Obama, a Democrat, will be sworn in as president with Republican George W. Bush , the man he will replace and whom he has often scathingly criticized, in attendance.

The cold and wear of the walk on my 53-year-old legs prompted me to take a break on my walk back across town at a fine restaurant where I had Louisiana Cajun food and a snifter of Kentucky rye whiskey to help me warm up. It was a nod to bipartisanship, as Louisiana and Kentucky were among the states that favored Republican John McCain over Obama.