Travis' Story

Man do I have stuff to tell. I have moved away and may never see the park again but I still have an opinion of it. Here are the details:

When I was young I used to go to the park and have picnics on the overlooks of Skyline Drive- a road that runs through the park. More recently my whole family and I would drive to Ravens Roost and have hot chocolate. I used to think of the park as something to visit, I never thought of how it was created. ThinkQuest taught me to think of it differently.

ThinkQuest all started when Ms. White took "recruits". When we had our team the first thing we did- after we decided on a topic-was watched the WPTV video The Iris Still Blooms. That gave us a really rotten opinion of the CCC boys (Civilian Conservation Corp.) and Reed Engle (a park ranger who we later found out was a guy just doing his job).

Then we started the boring stuff. Most of the time was spent on entering the data from the back of Darwin Lambert's book, The Undying Past of Shenandoah National Park. Kids, this was not just graphics and web searching, this was WORK. But it isn't all that bad. We took several field trips and our teacher got historical fiction author Carolyn Reeder to visit our school.

A few meetings later we were appointed "jobs"; Graphics Designer, Web Editor, Reference Specialist, etc. It was down to the nitty gritty so to speak. We learned our jobs and worked. We got several opinions. This is mine I think the park is a good addition to the nation. It is a fun place to visit and is something for us to do a project on. But don't get me wrong here; I think that it is horrible that so many people were forced to move. But like my teammates and I,  the people who were displaced  all had different opinions about moving. So no matter how the government tries to forget, The Iris Still Blooms.

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