It was the first time our daughter had ever been there, and the first time I had been in about 7 years (and even longer for my wife, also an alum.) We stayed at the inn and enjoyed a couple of day trips to the Cascades and to Mountain Lake, but I'll be totally honest...the town and campus has lost a lot of appeal to me. I guess I'm just a grumpy old man who prefers "the way things used to be", but it just didn't feel as much like a small college town anymore. I left town feeling a bit sad that I didn't really have a strong desire to return soon the way I always did before.

I was back in Blacksburg this past October for a career fair, and I got some time to wander the campus by myself a bit one evening. I enjoyed that and it brought back a lot of fond memories, but overall I still didn't feel the same draw. I know that I'm certainly not unique in feeling mixed emotions about seeing my alma mater evolve over the years - I think it's human nature bristle at the things that make us painfully aware of the fact that we are aging - but one of the things I really liked about Blacksburg was its remoteness and lack of a lot of commercial development. I guess I'm a bit of an "old soul" who probably would have enjoyed growing up in a bygone era, and even when I was at VT in the early 2000s, there were still some hints of those days gone by both on campus and around town. Now they're just a lot fewer and farther between, and it kind of makes me sad. And I'm not suggesting that modernization and growth is necessarily bad, just that I appreciated things "the way I knew them before."