Lessons from the Road

courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain

My wife and I spent the morning driving some 260 miles from our home near the coast to this campground at which will be residing for the next 7 nights. Adding to the normal challenge of such a drive was the task of towing our travel trailer not only up the mountains of western North Carolina (Okay all you Colorado people, stop laughing) but through the cities of Raleigh, Durham, Burlington, and Greensboro.

Raleigh and Durham we mostly by-passed by taking a slightly unconventional route. But Burlington and Greensboro were a matter of being hyper-vigilant while keeping a level head as we rode through on the Interstate.

The best part of the drive came when we’d gotten west of Winston-Salem, left the Interstate, and followed an old familiar highway I remember from my youth from there to our destination. It was during that part of the trip that the challenge of pulling the camper up the increasingly steep and long grades arose. It was also during that part of the trip that we caught our first views of the Blue Ridge Mountains on this trip.

We’ve been to the North Carolina mountains several times in the twenty-one years since I brought my bride home. Every time it is something special. This is the second time it’s been only us and the dogs, though. Always before our sons had been with us. Now they are grown with lives of their own.

The lesson of the road, though, was not one I learned from my traffic travails today. It is one I imagined being able to teach my students about their state. The highway that carried us from the Interstate to our destination here in the North Carolina High Country runs diagonally from the south-eastern corner of the state where the Cape Fear River meets the Atlantic Ocean to the northwest corner of the state where Daniel Boone once looked west towards Tennessee and Kentucky.

What a great lesson it would be if I could take my students on a field trip from one corner of the state to another. We could start at the ocean, cross the coastal plains, rise into the piedmont and foothills, and wind up in the mountains. For some of my students it would be the first time they’d ventured beyond the confines of their home county. Certainly, for many, it would be the furthest they’d ever traveled from home. And it would show them that there are places and opportunities galore right here in their own state towards which they could set their sights.

Alas, such a field trip would be costly, time consuming, and nearly impossible to get approved. But the idea is a sound one, I believe. If I am not able to make it happen in The Real World, perhaps, I can take them on a virtual tour of their state. After all, isn’t that what the internet is for; to take us places we can’t ordinarily go.

I want to share all the wonderful sights, places, opportunities and people of our state with my students. This is the lesson of the road I learned today.

As always, I remain,

The Exhausted Educator