WASHINGTON

For yesterday's war protest, Renee Hinson packed hard-boiled eggs, bananas and digital cameras.

She forgot something that most people take for granted: to bring a sign.

She did bring along a bit of fear. This was her first protest of any kind. A politically active friend had talked her into coming, and she was tired of getting angry at the news she heard on the radio as she sat in her car to pick up her daughter from school.

Hinson and her daughter accompanied more than 150 people from Winston-Salem who made the six-hour trip to Washington to join an anti-war rally, which was led by the group United for Peace and Justice. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered near the Capitol to protest President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

The rally unfolded peacefully, although about 300 protesters tried to rush the Capitol, running up the grassy lawn to the front of the building. Police on motorcycles tried to stop them, scuffling with some and barricading entrances.

Organizers had hoped that 100,000 would attend. They claimed even more afterward, but police, who no longer give official estimates, said privately that the crowd was under 100,000.

Hinson learned of the trip through a friend, who had e-mailed that St. Anne's Episcopal Church was chartering some buses to go to the protest on the National Mall. At first, Hinson worried about the crowds. "Scary, scary, scary," she thought.

But she worked up her courage and mailed in her money to the church for the trip, rather than hand-deliver it. In the back of her mind, she hoped that the buses would be full and the tickets sold out.

There was space available, though, and she was on her way, climbing aboard one of three chartered buses at 3:30 on a cold Saturday morning with her daughter, Olivia, 11.

Hinson's husband is a Republican. She is quiet and petite, a psychologist and a Democrat who never supported the war in Iraq. She never took a public stand against the war until yesterday, she said.

Her father, who lives in Durham and described by Hinson as a staunch Republican, still had no idea what his daughter and granddaughter were doing. She planned to tell him today.

The buses left from the parking lot of the Reynolda Manor Shopping Center on Reynolda Road and moved through the dark early yesterday, sailing down a nearly empty interstate past Greensboro and Durham.

The sky brightened somewhere near the Virginia border, where the caravan came to a brief halt on an entrance ramp when one of the buses had a problem with its air conditioning.

The buses moved on. One family celebrated their son's 13th birthday with butterscotch brownies. The entire bus sang to him. Olivia played Uno with three boys in the seats behind her.

Hinson sat scrunched down, headphones in her ears, buried in a paperback copy of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

At 10:30 a.m., the buses unloaded in front of the Branch Avenue Metro stop, bound for the long patch of grass, sidewalk and earth between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. As they neared it, you could hear the chanting and the drumbeats from a block away.

A giant dove flapped wings made of white sheets over a circle of thrashing, dancing young people banging bongo drums.

"War sucks," they chanted.

A group of students from Virginia Tech demonstrated for peace, as did some people from Colorado.

Communists were there. So were socialists, along with Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists, veterans from World War II and Vietnam, and Episcopalians and Methodists. Many were with air horns, stacks of fliers and rolls of political stickers.

Hinson grabbed her daughter's hand, and they jumped shouting into the sea of signs.

As the afternoon wore on, Hinson got louder, balancing atop her short golden hair a sign she had picked up that read "No More War" and cheering for Jane Fonda, who spoke from a stage far from Hinson's sight.

Fonda said that it was her first anti-war demonstration in 34 years.

"Silence is no longer an option," Fonda said to cheers. The actress once derided as "Hanoi Jane" by some because of her position on Vietnam said she had held back from activism so as not to be a distraction for the Iraq anti-war movement, but she needed to speak out now.

Sensitive to the old wounds, she made it a point to thank the active-duty service-members, veterans and Gold Star mothers who attended the rally.

She drew parallels to the Vietnam War, citing "blindness to realities on the ground, hubris ... thoughtlessness in our approach to rebuilding a country we've destroyed."

But Fonda noted that this time, veterans, soldiers and their families increasingly and vocally are against the Iraq war.

"This has gone too far for too long. We just have to cut our losses," Hinson said.

"Go, girls, go," she cheered as a pair of small children made their way through the crowd with a tall sign, and she laughed when she spotted a man dressed up as a George Bush inside of a missile.

"Olivia, there's a good one. Do you know what 'ego' means?" she asked her daughter, after they spotted a larger sign that read "Egos of Evil."

"It's such a feeling of solidarity," she said a while later, looking around her. "Instead of the two of us moaning alone in the car."

• Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.

• The Associated Press contributed to this story.