Posted Sep 03, 2008 at 01:18pm
Cashing in the big prize! A day on the Bush Legacy Bus.
TWIN CITIES, MN Day 3 RNC-The Bush Legacy Tour covered a lot of ground in the Twin Cities today. Today was a special day because we were in the company of Thad Ludwiczak who had won our online contest to spend a day on the bus. Thad is local to St. Paul and owns a small business that does direct mail. He has been following the bus online since we kicked off the tour. We warned Thad that he was in for fly-by- the seat of your pants kind of day and he was more than patient with all of the changes and additions to the “schedule.” He rolled with us the whole day, went to every stop, and was a lot of fun!
We started our morning like thousands of red-blooded Americans do every day at the Mall of America. We had a an event at 10am in the parking lot there and no sooner than we started to set up the mall cops asked us to move. We cooperated and moved to the area across the parking lot where the rest of the tour buses were. Seeing as we were set up along-side tour buses of the exact same size we thought we would be ok. We decided to park there for a while, especially considering three of our staff were inside shopping. We were there for about 5 minutes and had not set up any of our exterior accoutrements and the mall cops came back told us that we needed to leave. This was especially ironic because our bus was literally parked alongside of four or five buses that had signs saying “Republican Delegates in the windshield.” The locals that I spoke to later on in the day about this were especially enraged about us being thrown out given the fact that the mall gets huge subsidies from the taxpayers unlike most malls that operate completely privately. It s the mall’s loss, we were going to spend a lot of money on Orange Julius’s and things from As Seen On TV.
Guess which of the following buses was kicked out of the Mall of America parking lot...
After being thrown out of the mall we regrouped and eventually made our way to Gopher country at the University of Minnesota. We stop at “the U” and opened up the bus for an hour or so. We had a great response from the students who had just started back to class and were happy to have a distraction. We then packed up and headed over to the True Blue Minnesota movie screen that was set up on a major boulevard in St. Paul. The huge screen, the size and height of billboard was showing non-stop progressive films and video clips. They had been showing videos from the Bush Legacy Bus all week, which we were excited to find out. They popped in a couple of our videos while we had the bus parked there. We stayed for about an hour and let people on the bus. The highlight was a delegate with a McCain/Palin button on that put $5 in the donation jar. Keeping with our intense schedule we rolled out after and hour and went to another event at Golden’s Deli where they were showing a screening of the Iraq Inc. We kept the bus open for a couple hours and eventually headed back to our hotel in time to watch the RNC speeches on the TV. Thad stayed with us for a drink celebrating a chaotic but fun day. Thad enjoyed his time on the bus. And we really enjoyed having him. He was a great sport considering we did four stops, three of them unplanned. He fit right in and was great talking to people about the issues on the bus. We filmed a video of him describing his day and why he decided to take the day off of work to join us.
Golden's Deli
