As I stepped foot off the plane and into the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, I could feel the atmosphere completely flip. 

Toto, we’re not in Wyoming anymore.

The conference the previous year in Detroit was one thing, but this is the country’s capital, where diversity walks the street and I could already feel myself lean to the left. 

The reason to why I, a small town Wyomingite, was in D.C. was because I got picked to represent Wyoming at the Al Neuharth Free Spirit journalism conference. 

However, at this point, I was asking myself the same question.

After I unloaded my suitcase from the conveyor belt, I wandered around aimlessly, hoping I would find someone with a powder blue Free Spirit T-shirt or a representative from Close-Up.

In the movies, you see the driver with a board with a name on it. Expecting that scene to miraculously come to life, unfortunately it did not (however, this did come true for others on my flight). 

Instead, I ended up eavesdropping on a man panicking over the phone about me – the Close Up representative – all by accident.

He loaded my suitcase in the car and another man drove me to the hotel. As I got into a boujee Lincoln, I was given the run-down on what D.C. is like. (I technically could’ve been kidnapped, which crossed my mind multiple times).

I had the opportunity to arrive a day early, so I got to tour the District of Columbia, where I got a more in-depth feel of how this experience was going to pan out. 

My anxiety was through the roof; I knew there were going to be many disagreements and people I would have to stay away from when a political topic was brought up.

As Adviser Cappy has told me, we live in the conservative capital of the Intermountain West, so with that in mind, I had to find some close friends in the sea of liberalism.

Every day, we had multiple speakers, ranging from well-known journalists to media strategists to a U.S. District Court Judge. Every speaker brought something new to the table, and it was more in-depth on topics my previous conference went over.

I enjoyed my Wyoming bubble being popped (I’d surely disagree during those instinses), where many journalists had opposing views on some of the topics we discussed. It showed me more fresh perspectives and an in-depth feel on the world around me. 

I witnessed Trump protests outside the White House, where it seemed like the protesters were a tad discombobulated. The dissidents were holding up signs and chanting about how President Donald Trump was weak, while also holding other signs that said Trump is not above them (technically, his name is above them and their contradictory signs just show how some of them are unemployed, and probably uneducated too).

To memorialize the trip, I bought a MAGA bucket hat with another moderately conservative scholar from the democratic Hawaii. And let’s just say she did not get an aloha walking the streets of Waikiki with this hat on. 

In D.C., I was a small fish in a big pond, surrounded by bigger liberal fish who could probably turn me into stone just by looking at me (if you carefully look closer at them, you can see the snakes slither on their heads).

The opportunity to go to D.C. and learn more about journalism, be comfortably uncomfortable and to develop relationships with the staff and other scholars was an experience I’ll always look back on.

I’m grateful to bring back all the information that I learned that I can also pass down to the future of The Prowl. And I hope I can influence more Wyoming journalists to apply and get the experience of a lifetime.