I have left the little confines of Upstate New York for a couple of days in the bright lights of Washington, D.C. That is right folks, for an Election Geek like myself this town is also known as mecca and I have arrived. With that said I have gotten little chance to actually see any of the city as I am attending a conference for my day job. One member of my team who got here earlier spent his afternoon watching a Senate debate where he saw Hillary, Obama and many other 2008 candidates. I was jealous!

Anyway a little burst of reality hit me and my compatriots on the way down here. The pilot of the plane noted not just that the temperature in D.C. was 35 degrees yesterday in the early evening but that it was twenty degrees warmer then where we had just come from. Ouch.

I took some time this evening to walk around the National Mall and I froze my ass off. The feeling of frostbite and an asthma attack later (well actually both came at First Street at which point I realized I had to walk back down to Thirteenth Street) and I am in my hotel room with the heat turned all the way up and my palms resting on my nice warm laptop.

A girl stopped us outside of the Metro to try and give us information on, well, who knows some cause of some kind.

“Where are you guys from,” she asked.

“Upstate NY.”

“Oh, round Buffalo or so?”

“Rochester actually.”

“I meet a lot of you guys here. Why does everyone from your part of the country like to travel so much? Seems like you are always getting away.”

“Because when we stay home all we do is complain about how much we cannot wait to leave and how much we hate the cold.”

I leave tomorrow which means other then the somewhat blurry night shots of the capitol I don’t have much else to post. Still it is good to be in mecca, I will have to return on my own sometime in the near future.