By Betsy Foster
Special to the Collegian

Milking cows daily, planting corn, tending soybeans and harvesting wheat left little time for Linda Moore’s family to travel while she was growing up in Buchanan, Mich.

Today, Moore, who serves as Hillsdale College’s librarian for public services, has been to every continent except one.

“When I started traveling, I was a poor college student, and I traveled in the United States,” Moore said.

By 1986, she had visited all 50 states, visiting at least some sort of site in each one.

In 1998, Moore visited her fifth and sixth continent on a cruise to Antarctica that began in South America.

“I travel two to three weeks every summer,” Moore said. “I’m pretty much willing to go anyplace where they are not actively shooting people.”

Moore attributes this fondness for traveling to Pauline Hiatt, her high school librarian and former boss.

Hiatt, a widow with a son a year younger than Moore, used to arrange road trips for herself, her son and students. By camping and dividing up the cost, the group could afford to spend two to three weeks exploring some part of the country.

“The first trip I took was to the Grand Canyon,” Moore said.

On that trip, she rode down into the Canyon on a mule and stayed at the bottom overnight.

It was over 30 years ago that Moore and Hiatt began traveling together, and the tradition continues today. However, Moore is now the only one who accompanies Hiatt, and she usually acts as the chief planner of the trips.

The other students with whom they traveled now have jobs and families that don’t allow multiple weeks of vacationing.

However, Moore’s nine-month contract at Hillsdale enables her to take lengthy summer trips.

This past summer Moore and Hiatt visited Eastern Europe, spending time in Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest.

“I actually ran into Hillsdale College students in Berlin,” Moore said. “In some ways, it’s a small world.”

The Hillsdale students were traveling with history professor Tom Conner, who was leading the students around famous sites from World War I and World War II.

Moore said she knew she and Conner’s group would overlap in Berlin for about 48 hours, but she never expected to run across them in the large city.

Moore is planning an 18-day trip to Peru this summer. Five of those days Moore and Hiatt will spend on the Amazon River.

They also plan to visit Macchu Pichu, a ruin from the Inca Empire, which the Spaniards did not find during their looting of the Incas in the 16th century. Archeologist finally discovered the Macchu Pichu ruins in 1911.

Moore said the ancient civilizations of Latin America interest her because she studied some of them as part of her anthropology minor. In college, she also earned a minor in library science and a major in history.

After the Peru trip, Moore and Hiatt are discussing Malta as the destination for summer 2004 and possibly Iceland for 2005.

“I’ve been told, ‘You realize you can’t come back from one trip without starting to talk about the next,’” Moore said.

When exploring the world, she said she doesn’t worry about speaking the native languages.

“Most places a tourist goes, most people can speak enough English for business,” she said.

Furthermore, Moore and Hiatt usually travel with tour companies so that they do not have to concern themselves with the logistics of lodging, translators, and transportation.

Moore enjoys the relationships she builds with people on the tour groups.

“You develop lifelong friends,” she said. “I have a friend from almost every trip. You meet like minded individuals, people who like to travel and see the world.”

Moore said she couldn’t narrow her favorite trip down to just one. However, her top three were China, Antarctica, and an African trip that covered Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.

China is special to Moore, she said, because it was her first international trip.

Hiatt was not on that trip, but in 1983, Moore traveled across the world to China with Hillsdale College students, professors and others from the community. Leo Philips, a former Hillsdale religion professor, organized the group.

When asked if she would ever take charge of leading a group of students, Moore said no.

“That would imply work for me,” she said. “And I go on trips to have fun.”

Moore said she travels because she enjoys the way seeing other places makes international events more meaningful.

When the student protests occurred in 1989 at Tiananmen Square, it meant more to her, she said, because she could remember standing in Tiananmen Square.

“You become much more interested in others and other places,” she said. “There are places in this world you thought you’d never see. I never thought I’d visit the Kremlin.”

However, Moore did have the privilege of standing in the Kremlin on a trip to Russia in 1993.

Antarctica, another favorite for Moore, was a more recent venture, which she and Hiatt took in January 1998. In Antarctica, she and Hiatt saw primarily nature.

With one exception, Moore said they never saw another ship while in Antarctica.

“It increases the feeling of ‘no one has ever been here before,’” she said.

Moore spoke about her adventures in Antarctica on Tuesday for “Our Faculty, After Hours” in the library. This is the fourth such After Hours program the library has held this year. The library staff designed the program to highlight the diverse hobbies of Hillsdale’s faculty.