FIFTY-FREAKIN'-THOUSAND PEOPLE!!! Fort Collins population, including CSU students, is 153,000, so that means that darned near ONE-THIRD of the entire population of our fair town showed up to cheer for our next President. That just boggles my mind!
Obama's speech began on schedule at 3:30 p.m. People started lining up for the event at 4:15 this morning. (I warned a fellow Fort Collinsite that those crazy college students would beat us all to the punch in the thread about the Albuquerque rally last night - I hope s/he took it to heart!)
I moseyed on over to CSU at 11:30 after reading in the online edition of the local paper that "thousands" were already in line. (I had actually cruised by an hour prior to reading that and hadn't seen a soul... but it turned out the line snaked the opposite of the way I expected it to, so they just weren't in my line of sight.) Anyway, at 11:30 the line was probably a half a mile long and four or five deep. Remarkably, I did make it into the Oval itself though, where we were literally standing shoulder to shoulder and views of Obama were afforded only to the Jolly Green Giants among us (and lucky tots whose parents were willing to hoist them onto their shoulders). Nonetheless, I managed to get a few great shots of Obama during his speech by raising my camera high above my head and snapping away, and also got atleast fifty shots of the crowd from varying angles.
I came right home and downloaded the photos so that all of you pic-happy Kossacks could enjoy them and when my photo program said "delete files from camera" after it was done, I clicked "Yes."
Sigh. :(
Moments later the computer (it's a dinosaur) froze up on me and now every photo I took is lost to the ether. I'm just sick about it.
I did manage to find this shot, taken by Michael G. Seamens for The Coloradoan (our local newspaper).