Re-visiting Longwood

Sometimes you just gotta get out of town.

Chris and I spent the summer on the road, so when fall rolled around, we were happy to just settle in some.  However, we still feel like we need to split town for even a day trip every couple of weeks or else we feel cooped up.  Maybe that is because Lynchburg is kind of small.

Not as small as Farmville, though!  That is where we went to college:  Longwood University.  It is just an hour away.  And we had really been looking forward to walking over the now-restored High Bridge, which dates back to the Civil War.

First, we had lunch at Macado's, a little sandwich place.  When we were in undergrad, we would go there and split a cup of soup--it felt so special to not be eating at the dining hall.  While we had lunch, we figured out that we could get Eliot to eat by giving him bite-sized pieces on toothpicks.  Ha.  Then we went to the bookstore to get a sweatshirt for Chris.  He never actually got one in undergrad because he wanted one with the Rotunda.

On to High Bridge!

Unfortunately, I was too short to see over the rails, but it was still really pretty.  On the walk, we talked about what we liked about college, what disappointed us, and what could have made our experience better.  There were more things I could have gotten involved in (like when I was invited to join Lamba Iota Tau--the literary honors society at the school), but I transferred in and finished up after two years, so I didn't learn about these things until it was too late.  Also, the school had so much more to offer shortly after we graduated, like a student center with a rock-climbing wall, a Barnes and Noble bookstore with a Starbucks (there was no Starbucks when we went there), and now they even have a Moe's.

However, we look back on our time in college fondly.  I loved Longwood.  It was kind of like one of the last small, public universities in Virginia with my graduating class being less than 1,000 people.  And it is super haunted (no joke), which, you know, adds character.  Chris and I enjoyed walking all around Farmville and exploring.  We got to attend poetry readings and plays.  The library was amazing--I would go and read for class while Chris worked at the circulation desk.  I learned a lot and it certainly impacted the person I grew into, even in just those two short years.  Our time at Longwood flew by.

I was sad that we didn't have enough time to walk around campus.  It is fun, though, visiting a place where you once lived--you can almost take part in those memories again, yet you know how the story ends, or at least the next few chapters.