8.5 hours, 400 miles, 3 cups of coffee and 1 Diet Coke later.....

Here I am in Russell County!!! Where is Russell County, you may ask? I had no idea myself before getting scheduled to teach in this beautiful place...first of all, Russell County is in Virginia. Just barely if you ask me. I spent a couple of minutes driving through West Virginia (and you all remember how I feel about WVa) and found myself in the panhandle of VA, a few counties from the Kentucky border. As you can probably guess from the title of this post, it took us all day to get here. We left my office in Williamsburg around 9am and arrived at the hotel after 5pm. It was a lonnnng day. Four hundred miles long, to be exact.

Really, though, the trip wasn't so bad. My travel partner is this very interesting woman named Donna, who I surprisingly and maybe scarily have a lot on common with. She is a former dancer who runs a dance shoe supply store out of her home. She knits. She loves trivia. She travels with anti-bacterial wipes. She has a caffeine addiction. In eight hours, I really learned a lot about this woman, so I could go on and on with this list. We didn't even turn the radio on once, even though we discussed how nice it is that you can always find a strong signal for a country station anywhere in the state.

For lunch we stopped at a Staunton hot-spot, Mrs. Rowe's. Apparently this lady, Mrs. Rowe, started off by baking pies in her garage during the Great Depression for some extra cash. As things got better, she eventually was able to open a restaurant with her husband in 1953. She retired and turned the business over to her son, Mike, who I met and he gave me a Maple Walnut cookie on the house as I paid for my hot-turkey-mashed-potato-gravy-possibly-with-some-bread-involved plate of food. Oh how I wish I took a picture of that one. Instead of the food, all I got was the sign.

We continued on our way, passing towns with great names like "Troutville" and "Ironto." As we got closer to our hotel, we found the "Frog's Level Yacht Club," with Frog's Level being the name of a town, and no water feature in sight (not even a pond). I think we're going to try and go there for dinner one night.

Another strange thing I noticed as we got closer was evidence that this is really a coal mining area. Besides the obvious signs like big black trains going by every couple of minutes loaded with coal, there are billboards every couple of miles sponsored by a "Stay Out Stay Safe" campaign. One showed a silhouette of a child in the entrance of a cave with "Think this is a playground?" written across. Another was aimed at parents making sure their children knew that abandoned coal mines do collapse.

The homes look like the type of thing you see on TV shows mocking rednecks (and I thought my trip to West Virginia a few weeks ago was bad). It was very depressing to see the level of poverty so obvious just by looking at these homes, but to be in such a gorgeous setting was king of unsettling. There is this ridgeline that runs parallel to the road and right now the mountains are covered in fantastic fall colors.

To look to the left all you see is beautiful fall foliage dotted with rocks, and to the right you see trailers in utter despair with trash covering the yards. I hope I'm ready to meet the kids who live in these homes. One of the schools I will be teaching at this week has some info posted on their website: "Economically, many students are from single family homes, homes with unemployed parents, or parents who are dependent on welfare funds to meet family needs. These financial circumstances do not allow parents to provide a background of experiences and opportunities that prepare a child for school years. Of the adults older than 25, only 36% have a high school diploma." Did you read that??? High school diploma. Thirty-six percent. I just can't wrap my mind about what it would be like to grow up in this community. I hope I'm able to connect with these students and somehow get through to them how interesting and important something that happened 400 years ago is--knowing that most likely less than half will make it through high school because they need to find work to help support their families. I'd like to be able to show them that they really have a lot more in common with those in England in 1606 than they realize. If given the opportunity to have the freedom to explore, be given land, and the chance to find a fortune...would they take it?

Uhhhh on a lighter and now slightly inappropriate note, the hotel room I'm in is awesome! No signs of poverty here-king size bed, easy chair, desk, wireless internet (obviously), and its a Holiday Inn Express so I get a delicious breakfast in the morning. It will be at 6am since our school is over an hour away from here, but it will be delicious just the same.


I'm going to get to work with some program prep, since I'm teaching a program tomorrow that I've never taught before (and really haven't looked twice at). It is all about the colonists' life at Jamestown though so I feel like I can handle it without too much preparation or stress...