Hello from the breakfast room of an aggressively bland mid-range hotel somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard. I passed on some suspiciously neon eggs in favor of a bowl of Corn Flakes and a limp cinnamon roll.

For obvious reasons, I’m not able to get specific about where the Ruiz campaign is spending the weekend. Members of the press who are traveling with Ruiz (and, I think, Grantham) have been asked not to post on socials for the next few days, because there’s evidence that suggests Wednesday’s attack was made possible in part by location metadata embedded in a couple of photos posted to Twitter. The other reporters — including, surprisingly, the guys from Red State Report and The Blaze — and I are currently in something of a standoff with Ruiz’s team, which has requested we allow them to “scan” our devices for a “security check.” I’m not exactly falling all over myself to hand over my electronics to the people who already force me to take a pregnancy test to cross state lines.

I was headed pretty much straight for the blasts when the bombs went off. Ruiz’s campaign motorcade is famously unsubtle — none of the classic, brooding authority of a snaking line of black SUVs. “Rudy’s Ryde” is a red, white, and blue custom job (remember his hearse?), and it was parked on a public street alongside a couple of “decoys” that I guess nobody thought would basically be a giant “place IEDs here” sign. The things are practically visible from space.

The explosion happened during breakfast, when Ruiz was hosting one of those classic average-folks-in-the-diner confabs. The guys from the Post and the Times still can’t get enough of the idea of Rudy the Revival President as “just a regular guy” story (but let’s be honest, they ate up this angle even before the president was resurrected). But I’ve heard Ruiz’s canned answers (“Not on Rudy Ruiz’s time, and not on Rudy Ruiz’s dime!”) dozens of times by now, so I headed outside hoping to find something more organic than the Ruiz campaign’s carefully curated selection of regular Joe-Schmoes.