It is going to take a while to adjust to life on the road.  It takes much longer to get anything done, as the normal conveniences are non-existent. Switching from sleeping mode to driving mode alone takes at least 5 minutes of reorganization. While I could buy coffee, I choose to make it for a couple of reasons. One being that I budgeted for this trip and that would be a superfluous; the second being that I'm sort of partial to my coffee when I can have it. I felt I slept enough last night, but I  tossed and turned a good portion of it. The accommodations are comfortable and it wasn't a noisy stop, it just wasn't a solid night's sleep. I set my alarm and gave myself enough time to get to my first stop.

Natural Bridge State Park was gorgeous and I had it all to myself initially. I had an 11:30 appointment to make so I only had about an hour to spend on the trail. I will definitely return one day. I took the pictures that I could and enjoyed the scenery  and then  beat-feet back to the car. I'm definitely not in shape, hopefully that'll be a different story by the end of this trip.

Thankfully there was no traffic and I managed to get to Virginia Tech shortly after 11 a.m. to find parking. I checked my email to confirm where I was supposed to go and there was a  email for me stating that Senior Instructor Dunston had a slight change of schedule and would be able to meet earlier.  Thankfully he put in his number and I was able to give him a call so I could get to him as soon as possible. Good thing I had the number because it was a little difficult to know exactly where to go. Plus you need a card to get in the door anyway.

The facility was incredible and Instructor Dunstan was a wealth of knowledge. My intention was to get information for DAT but it looks like this program is better suited for music transfer students that have an interest in the Digital Arts audio production side. I took some notes and hope to share them with the music students that meet with me about our audio certificate.  Perhaps this is a good reason to strengthen the academic connection between DAT and music. I appreciated the offer to give me  more time if I had questions, but being that this isn't my area of expertise I wanted to let him get to what he needed to, in particular, lessons. I did ask if he would be open to speaking with someone more in tune (no pun intended) with this topic, and he seemed happy to do so. I'll be passing that info along in the near future.

I made my way toward my next destination, as I was quite ahead of schedule now. This afforded me time to get a little bit more organized and to work on using the gadgets I brought with me. For those of you that have been advised by me, you know how much I work with spreadsheets. I decided to use one for tracking this trip. I grabbed an old tablet we had and decided that's what I would use since it's quick to start up and has a long battery life (that is if you don't forget to keep it in airplane mode; which I failed to do the second day). Let me tell you, it does not work the way the one on the computer does. There is a decent learning curve. It's mostly the muscle memory to get effiecient with data entry but it definitely is not as convenient when running formulas, formatting, and copying cells. It's a challenge worth overcoming. I love the automatic tallies.