Preparing for departure

As I finally sit here and start to pack my bags for the trip that we’ve been planning for months, the excitement is starting to set in! Thinking ahead, I am most excited about learning about the legends within this culture. When I was a little girl I used to listen to my grandpa talk about nursery rhymes and I believed that they were real and actually happened during history. That being said, learning about the legends within this culture will bring me back to me early childhood days, which is exciting enough for me in itself. In counteraction to the excitement, my apprehensions lie within the journey to North Carolina. I do not get carsick but I am worried about how much legroom I will have access to. Since we are leaving before the sunrises, I will be wanting to go back to sleep almost immediately after we leave the college parking lot so I am worried about establishing comfortable body positioning for optimal sleeping opportunities.

I have yet to discover any new information pertaining to the counties and boundaries that we will be learning about, but I do know that there is a large casino (which is sad because that has nothing to do with their traditions and roots but I am looking very forward to learning about this culture).  Moreover, I have always been really interested in Native American culture simply because I posses so little information about them. I think that they are the most strongly rooted culture that I have learned about in school with people who are just as passionate about people within their culture as their traditions. However, I have unfortunately developed a stereotype for Native Americans. Because of everything I have learned about them during my education, I have grown to think that all Native Americans are mean/hostile because they all tend to hate white people because we basically got off the Mayflower and started stealing everything their owned and cared about. I know that this stereotype is not necessarily true for all Native Americans, but I do believe that it is valid for most of the population. I absolutely will not let these negative ideas hinder my learning or how I communicate and present myself during our time in Cherokee, but I strongly hope to eliminate this idea within my brain by the time we leave North Carolina this week.