Problem #1: I wake up at 5 a.m., because, you know, its 8 a.m. in D.C.  

Problem #2: The sun is already up.  

Luckily, the coffee bar is open in the hotel. My new mission for the morning, while the light is still good, is an old mission. The Mission San Xavier del Bac , to be precise. This turned out to be the highlight of my day.  

Next on my agenda was to pick up Roll Call Politics Editor Shira Center at the Tucson airport. From there we headed to Rep. Ron Barber’s campaign headquarters for a tour of the city and lunch at the famous El Charro Café . Neither the tour nor the lunch offered much in the way of photos, but I did get to feast on the “Famous Carne Seca” dish.  

After lunch, I shot a quick awards ceremony with Barber in a room that easily had the worst lighting I’ve seen in many years. Then Shira and I made our way to meet Mary Rose Wilcox, a Democrat running to fill Rep. Ed Pastor’s seat, in Phoenix. I hoped that the lighting would be better there.  

It wasn’t.  

Come on Arizona, you have such a pretty state, yet you hang out in rooms with terrible fluorescent lighting. Why do you hate photographers?  

There were no good photos of Wilcox at the meeting of Arizona Democrats. The only saving grace of the evening was an invitation to join Wilcox at her favorite hot dog stand to have my first Sonoran Hot Dog — something that was on my bucket list for this trip.  

The hot dog was quite tasty at this roadside, open-air hot dog stand. The ambiance could have yielded a really beautiful photograph as well. I worked the scene from various angles, but my quest for a marquee Roll Call style politics photograph wasn’t in the cards today.