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First off, yes, I'm still writing about our trip to West Virginia and North Carolina from last month. Yes, it's over 3 weeks since we returned home and I still haven't cleared the backlog of journal entries from it. But now I'm almost done. One of these last few I'm going to switch into the present tense instead of tying it to a particular day or location. Partly that's because it's about a question we discussing numerous times on the trip: "There are so many amazing waterfalls in North Carolina, why didn't we hike them when we lived here?"
Like I said, the thought occurred to us not just once but multiple times over the course of a few days. I blogged once about it already; see Why didn't we do this when we LIVED here? That blog reflects our first discussion on the matter. We came up with a few answers, partial answers, to the question. They still left us wondering. As we thought about it more we found better clarity. Ultimately the conundrum of "Why didn't we do this years ago?" comes down to three big things: Information, Money, and Time.
1) Information was arguably the biggest obstacle to us visiting all these waterfalls, or even a few of them, when we lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, many years ago. For this trip we found so much information online in website and blogs and via apps like AllTrails. When we were in NC in the mid 90s none of that existed. We had to find info in books. And yes, there were books back then. We saw plenty of books about waterfall hikes in gift shops on this trip, in 2023. But in the 1990s those books were fewer and not as widely distributed. ...And, no, it's not for lack of looking. Back in the 1990s "Let's stop in this bookstore and look around" was a regular thing. And I did find books on hiking in the state... but only a few, and most of them weren't very lucid. It's nothing like the wealth of information a person can find online with a minute or two of searching today.
2) Money. Money was another big obstacle. As "poor starving grad students" the idea of spending a weekend going somewhere and staying at a hotel for a few nights was pretty much outside the realm of possibility for us. We were happy doing day-trips... and indeed we did several memorable day-trips the summer we lived together in Chapel Hill. But getting over to the part of the state we visited on this 2023 trip would've taken most of a day just for the round-trip drive, leaving not that much time for actually hiking. It would've worked better as a weekend getaway— which we could ill afford.
3) Time. "Time is our most precious resource," I've said many times. Alas when I was a poor, starving grad student I wasn't just poor and starving. ...Actually I wasn't starving; I always had enough to eat. What I didn't have was free time. As a grad student you internalize that there is always, always, something else you should be doing to advance your studies. The mindset is not 9-to-5, it's 24/7. Everything that's not actively getting you closer to your doctorate, or to a publication, is a poor choice you should reconsider. Thus the number of trips I took in my 3 years in North Carolina was very few. Yes, it's ironic that now, many years later, I find it easier to carve out the time to travel to North Carolina from across the country than to visit it more widely when I lived there. But that's life.... Or rather, grad student life.
Like I said, the thought occurred to us not just once but multiple times over the course of a few days. I blogged once about it already; see Why didn't we do this when we LIVED here? That blog reflects our first discussion on the matter. We came up with a few answers, partial answers, to the question. They still left us wondering. As we thought about it more we found better clarity. Ultimately the conundrum of "Why didn't we do this years ago?" comes down to three big things: Information, Money, and Time.
1) Information was arguably the biggest obstacle to us visiting all these waterfalls, or even a few of them, when we lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, many years ago. For this trip we found so much information online in website and blogs and via apps like AllTrails. When we were in NC in the mid 90s none of that existed. We had to find info in books. And yes, there were books back then. We saw plenty of books about waterfall hikes in gift shops on this trip, in 2023. But in the 1990s those books were fewer and not as widely distributed. ...And, no, it's not for lack of looking. Back in the 1990s "Let's stop in this bookstore and look around" was a regular thing. And I did find books on hiking in the state... but only a few, and most of them weren't very lucid. It's nothing like the wealth of information a person can find online with a minute or two of searching today.
2) Money. Money was another big obstacle. As "poor starving grad students" the idea of spending a weekend going somewhere and staying at a hotel for a few nights was pretty much outside the realm of possibility for us. We were happy doing day-trips... and indeed we did several memorable day-trips the summer we lived together in Chapel Hill. But getting over to the part of the state we visited on this 2023 trip would've taken most of a day just for the round-trip drive, leaving not that much time for actually hiking. It would've worked better as a weekend getaway— which we could ill afford.
3) Time. "Time is our most precious resource," I've said many times. Alas when I was a poor, starving grad student I wasn't just poor and starving. ...Actually I wasn't starving; I always had enough to eat. What I didn't have was free time. As a grad student you internalize that there is always, always, something else you should be doing to advance your studies. The mindset is not 9-to-5, it's 24/7. Everything that's not actively getting you closer to your doctorate, or to a publication, is a poor choice you should reconsider. Thus the number of trips I took in my 3 years in North Carolina was very few. Yes, it's ironic that now, many years later, I find it easier to carve out the time to travel to North Carolina from across the country than to visit it more widely when I lived there. But that's life.... Or rather, grad student life.
