We arrived early in Nashville Tennessee, it was weird because I felt the bus stop and park, turn off, and I knew it was still early so I was going to continue to sleep. But then I felt it turn back on, and drive a little, stop again…well long story short the rooms weren’t ready so Dave, our bus driver, and Josh went to waffle house to eat breakfast while the rest of us all sleeping. When I awoke we were in the hotel parking lot. Our rooms still weren’t ready so Elliott, Vanessa, Erin and I decided to grab some breakfast. We were only a few blocks away from Vanderbilt University so we figured there would be a breakfast place somewhere around there. The Vanderbilt campus was very nice as well. The buildings were older brown brick, and there were a lot of trees and walking paths throughout the campus. It felt bigger than I expected, it was a good morning walk, even though it was a little colder than it had been, the cold air felt refreshing.
The rest of the day was spent relaxing, because usually the days are pretty hectic. Later that night we went downtown and found a sports bar to watch the Giants game. It also was next to a bunch of country type bars, every one I past had live music. We hit a few places up after the game and it was fun to sing and dance to some live country music. The band was really good.
Nashville was a blast but I did not look forward to sitting on the bus all day to get to West Virginia. The highlight of day was stopping at Waffle house for breakfast, where I had a delicious omelet and some hash browns. We got on the bus at 9am and got to our hotel in West Virginia around 8pm. Even with a few hour nap it was a long day, and when we got out of the bus it was colder than expected. Vanessa and I decided it was too cold to leave the room and ordered some Chinese for dinner.
Our hotel was only about a half mile from the venue, so we got there around 10am in time for load out of all the trailers. The West Virginia Coliseum looked like a giant cement muffin top, and that’s what we called it for the rest of the day. There was no catering so Vanessa and I decided we would wonder to try and find some breakfast for the bus. We asked a security guard where the best place to get coffee would be and he had no real suggestions. We then tried to ask him where the heart of campus was and he said it was pretty spread out. We found out he wasn’t lying, because later we were driven about 10 min away to the town hall forum. This part of campus was very hilly, which makes sense because they are the mountaineers. It had a few decent looking older buildings, but not much was done to upkeep them. Honestly not my favorite campus I had been to so far.
The town hall forum was a little bit a disappointment, the teacher that set us up with the room informed us that it was mountaineer week and a lot of other things were going on around campus. We chatted with a nice girl Kayla for a while and she described to us that West Virginia was a huge mining state and their economy ran on the coal mining. This included mountain top blasting where they would blast a mountaintop off so it could supply coal for only about a decade or two. If they were take time to mine through the mountain they could get coal supply for a lot longer, but blasting was easier. Also this sometimes polluted the water, destroyed a lot of the natural resources around the mountain. Overall they couldn’t get the school to do a whole lot because everyone thought they had to rely on coal, which there were alternatives that no one paid attention to.
On our way back from the forum we decided to take West Virginia’s famous public transportation called the PRT. It was an electrically powered rail system that had a few stops throughout the campus. As we walked out of the student center we bought some mountaineer food that they had set up for the week, which included a kettle corn stand and other carnival type food. We munched on our snacks and asked a few people to point us in the right direction to the PRT. As we got to the gate we scrounged for 50 cents each, which wasn’t working. A nice girl saw us struggling and swiped us all through because students didn’t have to pay. Then as we waited for the next tram, we started chatting with a few people about if we were in the right spot. We were told we were and just had to take it to the engineering building and then walk from there to the coliseum, which apparently wasn’t too far. As the doors opened, we started to walk on and were immediately being yelled at to get off. No one told us that when the doors opened you had to look up and there was a sign telling us where the tram was going. When we got on the tram was not going to the engineering building so good thing people told us to get off! We made it to the right place eventually…check out the pictures of what this thing looked like.
The venue seemed to get pretty crowded, but you could tell not a lot of students weren’t really down with the message of CCT, because we had virtually no volunteers. Therefore, I thought I wasn’t sure how quickly we were going to go through samples, because with no volunteers and a small set-up inside I didn’t know how much traffic we were going to attract. Surely enough I went through samples pretty steadily and a lot of people got pretty excited about it. I even got a picture of a bunch of kids all drinking their Silk. I was happy to see that all the samples went. I have noticed that mostly the girls tell me that they love it and drink it all the time. I always have to convince the guys to try and they end up liking it.
So far West Virginia was the worst school to try and get Reverb’s message out. Usually we are overwhelmed with volunteers and cheerful people willing to help, however cold, cloudy West Virginia. Hopefully Wake Forest will be a little better.
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