Washington, D.C.

Oh, hello; I didn't see you there. I was just updating this here blog of mine. What's that? You're interested? Well give me a second and I'll fill you in on what's been going on lately on my end.
So Sunday morning I caught a train to Washington, D.C. for the Results International Conference and 30th anniversary.

 In sum: it was pretty sweet. We had Sunday and Monday to attend a few workshops and get briefed on what we were going to lobby for on Tuesday. Oh yeah, and Monday night I met up with a recent Stetson grad in Georgetown and checked out that amazing, classic town and university. So cool.

So yeah, I said lobby. Now, I wasn't 100% sure what this entailed, but come Monday night I was pretty clear on what was happening the next morning. Our team was to go over to the U.S. Senate and House office buildings and actually meet with aides, Senators, and House Reps and lobby to them in person.
The morning began in the same room that the Titanic Investigation and McCarthy Trials happened with a speech from Dick Durbin - who, if you don't know the name, is the second most powerful person in the U.S. Senate.

That's Dick Durbin in the photo right above. He's a pretty cool dude!
Ok so we broke off into lobby teams for our states..I went with Florida and was with four people who were prepared beyond anyone at the conference in my opinion. This was clearly not their first time at the rodeo. So we started in the Senate building and met with Senator Lemieux's aide. After that we were attempting to get to the House office building but got lost, told some people we were "lobbyists", got some awesome "Official House Business" tag and got access to the Representative's subway between the office buildings (which is like an awesome, glorified mining car that the senators will ride with you)

Some of the lobby team^^

This is the sweet subway car
The next photo is when I was walking in the tunnel between the buildings to meet with Tampa Bay Rep Kathy Castor ya know, no big deal. (?!?!?!!!!)

The rest of the photos are just cool things I came across. The iPhone camera isn't too bad during the day!

The Capitol building

This is right outside of Union Station

We went to the Lincoln Memorial at 3:25am and we were the only people there. Well, we were the only people there after some guy with this group of three people crossed the boundary and touched Lincoln..to which a Federal Police Officer told the guy he'd throw him in jail for years for it, but that "tonight's your lucky night". Pretty crazy being around this thing and the reflection pond without a single person around. It's enormous.

Anyway. We lobbied on Tuesday which was insanely fun and interesting. Wednesday we were at the Results HQ debriefing and having a strategy session. It was a pretty useful meeting.
Here's where things get a little more interesting. So we're planned to leave at 10:25am on a train on Thursday morning. Pretty standard right? Go to train, get on, come home. Well, not for me!  It has been forever since I've ridden a train for actual state-to-state travel so I forgot that in order to get back on a train one needs to bring one of those tickets you got originally back to the station. I get to the train station about 30 minutes before my train and realize I have no way of getting on this thing; so I run to the Amtrak counter and get stuck in an enormous line. Luckily I aggravated an already overly-aggravated Amtrak worker enough that he skipped me to this grreeat Amtrak dude who was like "OMG LET'S GET YOU ON THAT TRAIN!!" so I bought a new ticket, and sprinted through the station Mission Impossible style - like, if things were blowing up around me I totally would have lived - but regardless, I get to the gate, and the train taking off, and my travel partner pissseedd off. So, I walk back through the, luckily not blown up from my sprinting, Union Station and the Amtrak guy just goes "Didn't make it didja?" "Nope". Luckily we had a friend driving back to Durty Jersey from the conference so we called him and he gave us a ride back...which we probably should have done from step one; we didn't even need a train back. Anyway, now I'm back in NJ and pretty much ready for this weekend. I took a few photos on my real camera which I traipsed along with me all week for like 10 photos ha. Anyway, I'll upload those later. Hope all is well in your neck of the woods, readers! If you read this...comment! Let me know how you are doing. This feel like such a one sided conversation!
-Jack