Swan Lake chef cooks up a political vacation in N.H.

When faced with a long vacation, many people seek warmer climes and postcard locations, like Arizona, Hawaii or maybe the Florida Keys.

Not so much for Kathleen Moon, who is spending her off time in New Hampshire to experience the early presidential primary process firsthand.

The owner and head chef at Laughing Horse Lodge in Swan Lake, Moon closed up shop for the season in October, packed her car and headed across the country to Little Rock, Arkansas. After a month of work as the chef at a hotel in Arkansas’ capital city, she pointed her car toward the Granite State, the site of the country’s first primary.

“I wasn’t planning on spending so much time up here, but the weather was so nice that I decided to drive up,” Moon said in a phone interview Friday from a Democratic fundraiser in Manchester’s Verizon Arena. “We have a lot of people in this country that give their opinions based on a few-seconds sound bite, and I wanted to give my opinion based on something real. I’m fortunate that I’ve got the time to be able to do this.”

For the past month, she’s been criss-crossing the tiny New England state, attending debates, town hall meetings and other events, listening to prospective voters as well as the field of Republican and Democratic candidates as they try to make the case they are best equipped to be president. Her dispatches have been posted periodically at www.bigforkeagle.com.

Moon, who describes herself as a “passionate centrist,” said she has had the opportunity to personally speak to all of the candidates except for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and said she’s gotten a much more intimate look at how politicians behave when the television cameras aren’t rolling.

“There’s nowhere else in the country that you can do that, and by the time we have ours in Montana [in June], it’s pretty much done,” she said. “When you’re in small meetings, quite a few of the Republicans come across quite progressive in how they want to deal with Wall Street and revamp taxes.”

She said the in-person meetings with the candidates have revealed candidates often starkly different from their debate personas: she described former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as “very warm and intelligent”; former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as incredibly uncomfortable with the message his handlers were pushing on him and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as fascinating, while attracting “more of the camo-shirt crowd.”

Moon has recently been featured as a commentator on radio host Michael Smerconish’s radio show and was profiled Saturday morning on his CNN television show as a voter who went the extra mile —literally — to make an informed decision.

Yet after a month of political rallies, fundraisers and stump speeches, Moon says she still hasn’t gotten her fix of politics and policy. If the weather permits, she’ll leave the day after the primary and drive down to Washington, D.C., to spend a month visiting think tanks and attending floor sessions and committee hearings in the Capitol.

An unapologetic political junkie, she said she’s been this way since an early age.

“When I was not even of voting age, I was a Young Republican for Nixon,” she said. “At the lodge, I’ve always engaged in and welcomed political conversations. ... I would have debate parties at the lodge. In the last few years, [the partisanship] has softened up a little bit. Now we’re talking politics again and I enjoy that.”

Still, despite her rare opportunity to watch national political candidates electioneering in the flesh, Moon was reluctant to offer up any predictions for Tuesday.

“I have not a clue. There is no way you can call this,” she said.

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.