While we were staying in Steamboat, we decided to take a day trip to Craig, Colorado, a small mining town about fifty miles west. Zac and I arrived during the Memorial Day street fair. There were plenty of hotdogs, one Zumba demonstration in the street, and lots of little kids in cowboy boots.
We also saw several signs posted on shop windows and telephone poles inviting us to "Meet Mitt!" Curious, we tracked down a local newspaper and there it was: Mitt Romney... Meet Craig, America. The presumptive Republican nominee was planning a stump speech in our neck of the woods.
Well, Zac doesn't like to declare an allegiance and I'm not planning to change mine anytime soon, but we couldn't pass up a chance to join in the fun. So the next morning, we woke up at 5:30am, made the drive west with coffees in hand, and got in line behind what seemed like hundreds of coal miners who had been bussed in, in uniform, to show their support.
The woman directly in front of Zac had a plug of Copenhagen in her lip large enough to, well, make its presence known. I made friends with the two women behind me. One of them offered to rent us her barn to live in should we decide to make our home in Craig. I made sure to get her name and number. The other told me she didn't want to be on tv because her friends might see her, but when we passed a merch table holding bumper stickers that read, "Hot Chicks Vote Republican" she slapped my ass and said, "that's you, honey!" I was fully undercover by that point, so I just smiled and took it as a compliment.
Volunteers for Romney came by offering free hats and t-shirts with pro-energy, pro-Romney slogans emblazoned on them to all of us standing in line while police, Secret Service, and other security agents kept watch from the roof and a sixty-foot boom truck. Local police were out knocking on doors of the nearby apartments to make sure all was as it should be.
But they let us in. All we had to do was scribble our names down and take a Romney sticker in for the show.
Since we had a little over two hours to wait for Mitt to appear, and because there are only so many times you can listen to the same country music songs play over and over (two refrains I remember: "Shake it for me, girl" and "this is America"), we watched pretty closely as Romney's team readied the crowd for his appearance. Some of the crew handed out handpainted signs to crowd members, others were busy vetting citizens for interviews, and still more ushered in a specially chosen front row -- a couple of veterans, some middle-aged women, a man in a cowboy hat. And all the while the Secret Service scanned the crowd.
At long last, the clouds parted, and Mitt took the stage. I don't have much to say about his speech, except that it was pro-energy, anti-Obama, and very well-received in Craig.
Fifteen minutes later, Mitt was shaking hands, Zac was staring down the Secret Service, and I was heading for open air. We came, we saw, we met Mitt.
