What an incredible afternoon and evening, although it didn’t proceed according to plan.

I had expected to arrive at Invesco late in the afternoon, but a shuttle bus appeared while I was down in the lobby of the Hawaii delegation’s hotel and it was heading directly there. So I climbed on, waving my blogger press credential.

So we arrived and were seated by about 3 p.m., oblivious to the fact that thousands of people were standing in lines outside that didn’t go anywhere, or went to the wrong places, or circled back on themselves. I was told later that things got tense and police had to be called.

Inside the stadium, water stations were set up throughout the delegate seating areas dispensing cold water. Good thing. It was hot.

The afternoon started slowly, but picked up energy when the live entertainment started, and anticipation built though a series of speakers.

It was part rock concert, part Mardi Gras, part campaign rally, part revival, part anticipation of history in the making. By the end of Barack’s speech, many people with big personal investments in the Obama campaign were in tears, having been with the campaign from long shot to the nomination.

Congressman Neil Abercrombie, who met Barack’s parents in Hawaii in 1959, had to wipe his tears away, too.

I had planned to do some live blogging and the post photos from the field, but the heavy demand strained the phone systems and my Sprint broadband speeds slowed to a crawl. So I decided to chuck it all and just concentrate on getting some good photos from the midst of the Hawaii crowd.

Here’s Lono Lyman sometime there in the afternoon. You can see the crowd building. The sun dropped out of sight about 6 p.m., so this was considerably earlier in the afternoon. In any case, just click on this photo for more of the afternoon.

I am not going to manage to finish more photos this evening. It’s 11:30 p.m. here, I’m sunburned and tired, and you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow morning.

I’ll get more posted then.

I think my wireless connection may be too slow here at Invesco to support an upload of lots of photos…stay tuned.

Click for more.

It’s a festival of capitalism around the convention center, where various caucus meetings and other sessions are being held during each day this week. Everything is for sale. Shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, accessories, hats, you name it and you can probably buy it.

And there are a lot of folks attending the convention who are hoping–and working hard to be sure–that the openly for sale atmosphere does not extend into the convention and the party itself.

As the kids told me definitively yesterday, “Obama can’t be bought.”