Trading the breakfast room for the convention floor

DENVER -- On Sunday morning, after the four-grain blueberry pancakes with lemon butter had been served, Kate and Dennis Singletary, the husband-and-wife proprietors of the Long Dell Inn in Centerville, checked out their guests and rushed to catch a midday flight to Denver.

Kate Singletary is a Barack Obama convention delegate, a post whose duties make it hard to take advantage of the late-August high season for bed-and breakfasts in Cape Cod. This week, the Long Dell Inn is closed.

"It's worth it," said Singletary, who realized after being elected as an Obama delegate during Massachusetts’s February primary that she would have to choose between the inn and conventioneering. The choice would not be a difficult one, she concluded. "It may have been with a different guy, but I've been following Obama for a while."

Singletary, a lawyer and former theatre administrator, opened the seven-room inn with her husband, a chef, in 2005. This is the first time they have closed during tourist season, and Singletary has been busy trying to explain to would-be guests why they will be closed over the week before Labor Day.

"If people ask why, I tell them I am an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention, but I don't do that as a matter of course," said Singletary, who has been coordinating volunteer efforts for Obama on Cape Cod and the neighboring islands. "During the primary, we had several heated conversations in the breakfast room. We don't discuss politics all the time. After all, these people are on vacation."