UPDATE: Loudoun County schools will be closed Inauguration Day.

ORIGINAL POST: The hottest ticket in town is free, but your chance of scoring one is slim.

Requests for Jan. 20 inauguration tickets are pouring in, said Jennifer Allen, spokeswoman for the freshly reelected Congressman Frank Wolf (R) who represents Loudoun County as part of Virginia's 10th Congressional District.

Allen said Wolf’s office has already received several thousand requests for tickets and the congressman’s Web site has gone down a number of times because of the increased traffic. It’s not known at this point how many requests are from Loudoun residents.

Jessica Smith, communications director for Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.) said his office has received more than 20,000 ticket requests.

Smith said they haven’t been told how many tickets they’ll receive for President-Elect Barack Obama’s swearing in, but based on past presidential inaugurations, she predicts they’ll get between 300 and 400 tickets.

“I read in this morning’s Washington Post that 240,000 tickets have been printed,” she said, adding, “Of those, many will be distributed to the Obama campaign people, of course, and then they’ll be allocated to each senator and congressman’s office.”

(I think that was her polite way of saying our best view of the historic event may be from the comfort of our living rooms.)

That doesn’t mean you can’t still ask, however. To request tickets online through Congressman Wolf’s office, click here. At Senator Webb’s Web site, follow the directions found here to be placed on the ticket wait list. (Note: The sites may be slow to load, since many people have been sending in requests.)

Senator-elect Mark Warner (D-Va.) is also taking requests, and because he doesn’t yet have an official government Web site, his office may be an overlooked and untapped source.

A Warner volunteer campaign staffer Walt Wurfel said ticket requests to Warner’s office should be e-mailed, along with your name, complete address, phone number and the number of tickets you’d like to info at markwarner2008 dot com.

Good luck with your ticket search. Let us know if you are in search of tickets and what you've done to try to get your hands on them.

RELATED CONTENT: Check out washingtonpost.com's Inauguration Watch blog for all things related to the 2009 inauguration events. Living in LoCo will continue to be on the case for any Loudoun-related inauguration stories and news, so check back here, too.