Virginia Tech Hokie Nation

Our oldest daughter and I took her oldest daughter Jennifer back to Blacksburg yesterday, to start her second year at "Tech", a place she could not wait to get back to, after a summer in Martinsville working pretty much fulltime as a lifeguard. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot across the street from her new dormitory to start the unloading process, I knew by her almost constant talking and nervous energy, that she felt she was back at her real home... the only place she really wanted to be...a place she started to miss last May, well before we got five minutes off campus, when we picked her up to come home for the summer . She was a resident Hokie again...something I have to admit I would have loved to have experienced myself. I went to "Tech", but mine was in Michigan, and while we were Huskies up in the cold Upper Peninsula of the Great Lakes state, we had nothing like the pride, spirit, and feeling of belonging to something very special, which VT students, faculty and alumni have. Hokie Nation is that indeed, but it's also "family", and I suppose I am a part of that family now, albeit extended by distance and grandfather relationship to a single student there. We ARE Virginia Tech.