Interview With Vicky Somma of TGAW
•Vicky, please give my readers a background about yourself. What made you want to start tgaw.wordpress.com?
I started blogging by accident! My sister started her blog before mine. Her blog was set up to require commenters to have a valid WordPress login. Well one day I wanted to comment on something, so I had to create an account. Lo and Behold it refreshed the screen and took me to my very own and very empty blog. Well, I couldn’t just leave it blank. That was almost six years ago.
It is a personal blog, so the focus of my blog does meander, but more often than not I tend to post about hiking and trees.
•Vicky, please tell my readers about your camping experiences in the Appalachians. Would you do it again?
I was lucky enough to live in Southwest Virginia for 15 years and had numerous trailheads for the Appalachian Trail were within an hour’s drive of my house. If I had an empty day or even an idle afternoon in the summer, I could just load up my dogs and hit the trail.
Even though I live away from the mountains now, I still come back for visits. Any season there is something to see. The winter is great to reunite with frozen waterfalls. Spring– wildflowers. Fall– Changing Leaves. For the summer, we take an annual camping trip at Grayson Highlands State Park in Southwest Virginia. We strategically select a date in early-mid June. Grayson Highlands is known for its great views and the wild ponies. But we go for the rhododendrons! The mountains are covered with them and when the rhododendrons bloom, large patches of the mountains are pink. Rhododendrons at Grayson Highlands State Park I read a John Muir quote at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find that going to the mountains is going home.” Now that I live away from the mountains, I really relate to that quote. Every time I go back for a visit as soon as the silhouettes of the Appalachians come into view, I feel like I’m coming home.
•Home Has tgaw.wordpress.com changed your life?
Blogging has been a great educational experience. I am continually learning. Even in simple posts, I really don’t want to sound like an idiot– so I end up doing a lot of reading and fact checking. It’s also introduced me to a lot of new species. I learned Lion’s Mane Mushroom, Winged Sumac, Breasted Nuthatch, Ospreys, Mountain Andromeda all because I wanted to properly caption a picture on my blog. On more than one occasion, I have found myself up way past my bedtime captivated by something (like the rediscovery of the Virginia Roundleaf Birch or the stories of the trees that survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing) I’ve uncovered while researching a blog post.
Malcolm X once said, “I’d put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking.”
If you aren’t too keen on prison, I say start a blog and take it seriously. The tuition is free and the subjects you can explore are limitless.
•Vicky, if you could camp with any celebrity for one week in the Appalachians, who would you chose and why?
If anyone who has a Wikipedia page qualifies as a celebrity, I would love to hike with rain forest canopy researcher Nalini Nadkarni. I very much enjoyed her book Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connection With Trees. I also admire the outreach she did with inmates at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center where they helped research the best ways to cultivate moss. I would love to meet her one day and just…listen and absorb. And what better venue for learning than a hike through the oldest mountains in the world? : )
But if we are looking for someone prevalent on TV and has a strong IMDB presence, let’s go with Tim Gunn from Project Runway. He seems to have such a delightful personality. Oh, I expect he’ll be out of his element, but I bet he’ll have some great facial expressions and will vastly expand my vocabulary as we talk! : )
Thanks Vicky for the interview. Visit Vicky's blog @ TGAW