Day Two-Morgantown, West Virginia and eastward

I was prepared to find Morgantown similar to Huntington, but was pleasantly surprised at a very viable downtown area. We ate lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant and market on High Street. Then, as we still had some time, we drove around. I had not known that there are two campuses for West Virginia University. One is near High Street and the other is up above, at a high elevation. There is a monorail that connects the two areas, providing transportation for students who need to get to the other campus. One last suprise was the kinds of stores we noted. After growing up in the New York City metropolitan area, in 1975 I moved to Nashville and had to adjust myself to not finding things I was used to. Yet when I returned to Nashville in 1994 the city had grown and become more diversified and those "missing" things were there. This latest move to West Virginia has put me back into the "not found here" cycle. For example, there are no bagel stores. Now some of you may shrug and say so what, but anyone from the New York area will very much understand and now send me a dozen REAL bagels. LOL. Anyway, I've been referring to Huntington, WV as "white bread America". There is, for the most part, a paucity of diversity. And I assumed Morgantown would be the same. But the shops and restaurants we passed showed it has drawn much more of a variety of folks.

We then headed over to the lower campus and got Sam registered for his program. The Governor's School of Math and Science invites 2 rising 9th graders from each county to attend one of two sessions. The other session was held at Green Bank, the site of the world's largest rotatable radio telescope. Sam felt that program may be too heavy in areas he did not already know, so he opted for the WVU program. For the next two weeks he will be using math and science skills to design an amusement park.

The Governor’s School is well staffed and as we began to park in front of the dorm one young man came over and told us to pull around back. There several other staff helped us unload Sam’s stuff into a wheeled cart and Sam and Graham went in to get him registered and his room key while I parked the car back out front. Sam is in a double with another double for a suite. The dorm is one of the older buildings on campus but had been renovated recently and looked great. Certainly his room is more spacious than I remember my own double campus room at Rutgers eons ago.
The boys are on the 3rd floor, girls on the second. A large common room on the 2nd floor with a ping pong table drew Sam’s interest. The cafeteria on the 1st floor was about the size of the large dining hall at Vanderbilt and the menu that was posted for this coming week looked geared right for kids.

We headed over to the next building for the orientation meeting where we were introduced to the mentors, the interns and the faculty. Many of the mentors and interns were themselves alumni of this or another of the Governor’s Schools and the faculty primarily were scientists who teach on the high school level. The dean of the program is a likeable man who introduced his teddy bear that was available for hugs. He was the one who told us parents not to call and not to visit. Our kids would be allowed to use their cell phones only from 10-11 at night and to let them make the contact. And with that, we were told not to cry when we left.

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The countryside east of Morgantown into western Maryland remains quite hilly as it is still in the Appalachians. We stopped at the Maryland Welcome Station on I-70 east to change into vacation clothes.

Traffic is an interesting, live creature. How many times have you been stuck in a slow-down at a time when "rush hour" just does not make sense? This jam lasted about 25 miles and took about an hour. When it cleared and we were able to get back up to 70mph all we saw was one car, parked well over on the shoulder and a couple of people up the slope picking blueberries. It seems that there could be no way for that activity to cause all the back-up and it probably didn't. But it could have been another group of people, perhaps an hour earlier and several drivers slowing down to look....the ripple effect CAN cause that kind of a jam. When a driver in a well moving but fairly busy roadway slows to any speed 10mph or lower under the actual speed of the traffic, a jam can occur. Eons ago, when I worked for the engineering and planning consulting firm, I was just getting into traffic analysis before I got laid off. I remembered that traffic flow was rated on an A-B-C-D-E scale with this photo being a D....or maybe an E....creeping along, essentially bumper to bumper. When I did a little google search trying to find a schematic to show you, I discovered traffic anaylsis has evolved beyond that.....and so I discover, once again, that time passes and I am getting older.