Right Wing Nation

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . uh, sorry.

In a comment, Darren sez:

You’ve been in on conference calls and such, all leading up to this. How did it start? Did you contact the campaign or the party, did they follow your support of McCain on your blog–How?

I dealt with the conference call part in the comment thread (by the way, you can join the mailing list here — it’s a Yahoo group, so to join, you need to create a Yahoo ID if you don’t have one). The convention. Well, that’s a whole differnt critter that started months ago. Like January. Or maybe earlier. last October.

I’m on all the GOP mailing lists (surprise, surprise), and I got put on the GOP Convention mailing list. Anyway, a message went out about blogging the convention, with the instructions for how to apply. I applied.

Skip ahead a month or so. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that I read several gunblogs daily, and one of those daily reads is The Bitch Girls. Bitter Bitch (one of the bloggers I have actually met in meat life) announced that she was organizing a blogger bash at the NRA convention in Louisville.

Like the bumper sticker says, I luv Lou-a-vull. I was born there. Used to live there. People to see, places to re-visit, restaurants to re-visit, etc. Louisville is a doable drive from here, about 10-11 hours, plus I know my way around the city, so there would be no need to stay in one of the hotels the NRA had booked up. IOW, I was extremely interested.

I couldn’t afford to do both conventions, though, so I didn’t commit. I told Bitter and Sebastian (another blogger I’ve met, with Bitter — they’re a couple) I might, depending on whether I was going to get credentialed to blog the GOP convention or not. The NRA convention was in May, and it was now November. I assumed I’d find out one way or another before the convention in Louisville, and since I didn’t need to stay in one of the booked hotels, I could pretty much just drive to Louisville, if it turned out I wasn’t going to get to blog the GOP convention.

Uh, well, I didn’t find out. Months passed. May arrived. Then I realized that the NRA convention was during finals week. Oops. Bad, bad, bad timing. Anyway, I didn’t go to Louisville.

I only got a message from the convention people last week. I mean, come on. Get it together, folks.

So that’s when I did a little research, and found that (of course) all of the hotels within a ten mile radius of the Twin Cities were booked. I still do not know if the GOP has booked rooms for independent bloggers, as they have delegates and the press. I also found out that flying there would cost at least 3,000 bucks.

If we go, we’ll most likely drive. Chicago is a hundred miles over halfway, and about the same distance as Bloomington, so we could stop in Chicago for the night (and hit the Frontera Grill), then drive the rest of the way the next day.

That’s if. I’m not real keen on the idea of staying in a hotel 15 miles away from the city, driving in, and finding a place to park every day. So I’m waiting for the convention people to answer the question I asked, oh, five days ago.

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