muscadine | North Carolina

Well, I'm finally back. We got in yesterday afternoon. About the only positive part of the trip was the visit to NCSU itself, and that was a fairly mixed bag.

It rained hard throughout the drive Saturday evening. It was dark, and up in the mountains it was of course curvy, and the trucks made it almost impossible to see. Allen has a bit of night-blindness so I had to drive the whole way. We watched the news that night at the hotel and decided we'd need to skip out on our sit-down breakfast and make a break for Raleigh before the weather kicked in. About two hours in the rain started to turn to sleet and freeze on the roads. Allen is deathly afraid of driving on ice, so again I had to drive. Which wouldn't have been so bad, but the 5 hour trip turned into a 7 hour trip, meaning it was like I had driven the whole way. And that's a long time to stay concentrated. We didn't stop at all. It really wasn't bad to drive on til the very end. Traffic was light and people were driving reasonably for the most part til we got to Durham.

Once we got into Raleigh we had to find a hotel that was not too expensive but not too far from campus, because at that point we didn't know what was going to go on the next day. Found a Ramada that suited our needs fairly well, called our contact, and found out that most likely few people would be in Monday. Especially not the graduate head, who was stuck in Chicago because of the snow on the east coast. Great. So we spent the next 24 hours holed up in the hotel. Luckily they did have an in-house restaurant so we took our meals there. Monday morning I called to see what the outlook was, and the contact lady said that I could come in Tuesday morning and do a reasonable facsimile of what had been planned Monday. We decided that we might as well stay, as we'd already come this far to see the school, and the roads were bound to ice up that night anyways. Needless to say, our bank accounts did not thank us for this trip.

That afternoon the roads were a bit clearer, and we had cabin fever, so we got out and wandered around campus for a bit. It's huge. They have their own bus line. Apparently many of the buildings, including the one housing sociology, are about to undergo extensive rennovation. Rah.

All went pretty much according to plan Tuesday. We talked to a couple of professors, and the graduate head even made it in to talk to us at the very end (personally, if I had gotten home after what she went through, I'd have gone straight to bed, but I was thankful she came out to talk to us). The best and most informative part, though, was probably the two graduate students we spoke with. Treasure troves of information, especially the first one. More on that later today.

We left right after noon and headed back towards home. I had hopes we might be able to go all the way back to Memphis, since the roads were clear, but it was not to be. We were both pooped, so we stopped in Cookeville for our final night on the road. Drove in the rest of the way yesterday, and spend the afternoon/evening catching up on everything. So now here I am catching up here, finally. Don't even want to look at our finances right now. Blah.