Lynn Blanchard previews Tar Heel Bus Tour

The 2025 Tar Heel Bus Tour will kick off May 14, after Hurricane Helene postponed the tour last October.

Two buses loaded with Carolina faculty and administrators will travel across North Carolina — one bus to the east and the other to the west — to connect with various communities throughout the state in a three-day excursion.

Lynn Blanchard, director of the Carolina Center for Public Service, spoke with The Well to preview the tour.

Can you give us a brief history of the Tar Heel Bus Tour? 

The Tar Heel Bus Tour premiered in 1997. Chancellor Michael Hooker, who remarkably visited all 100 counties in North Carolina, created the tour for faculty, and over five days they went from east to west, covering the state from the coast to the mountains. The tour has many goals: learning about the places our students call home, what kind of work and partnerships Carolina has across the state and learning about the culture and geography of the state.

The tour went on hiatus after the economic recession in 2009, but former Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz brought it back in 2019.

Last year’s tour was canceled in October due to the impact of Hurricane Helene across the state. What went into the decision to reschedule it for the spring?

After Helene played havoc in the western part of the state, Chancellor Lee Roberts made the right decision to cancel the tour so the University could assist with disaster response. We didn’t know at the time whether we were canceling it altogether or postponing it.

We used to do the tour the week after graduation, so we looked at the calendar and decided that it would work to bring it back to the spring. We may keep it this time of year because hurricanes don’t hit in May.

What are some of the highlights for the west bus?

We’ve planned a couple of things for the west that we’re really excited about. One of the first stops is going to be to the Multi-Agency Donation Warehouse in Statesville, which was established to support relief efforts after Helene. The warehouse stores donated supplies, and they send them out to organizations on request.

One of the people who has been very active in our efforts in responding to Helene is Bill Gentry, a faculty member in public health and the director of the Community Preparedness and Disaster Management Certificate Program. He’s been in this business a long time, and he’s going on the tour as a special commentator.

In the far west, in Cherokee, we’ll have dinner with the chief justice of the Cherokee Tribal Court, the CEO of the Cherokee Indian Hospital and the chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. There are a number of partnerships that Carolina and our American Indian Center have there, so I think those conversations will be very interesting.

You’ll be riding on the east bus. What stops are you looking forward to?

One of the things that that we’re most excited about, and we haven’t done in a while, is that we’re going to “The Lost Colony” in Manteo. One of the main reasons we wanted to go there is that they have made major changes to the play, which was originally written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green in 1937. We’ll get a tour and have dinner afterwards at the Elizabethan Gardens to talk about the revisions and how they have updated the play at a time when many outdoor dramas have gone away.

Then we’re going to Corolla and the Pine Island Audubon Sanctuary. We will meet with the folks from the North Carolina Collaboratory, UNC and Elizabeth City State to learn and see how they’re using drones around environmental issues up in that area.

The buses will each cover over 600 miles before returning to Chapel Hill late Friday afternoon for a reception where participants can reflect on their travels and share some of what they have experienced.