For now, the eighth-grade teacher at Rogers-Herr Middle School has to settle for sharing her experiences from the Martin Luther King Civil Rights Heritage Tour through her social studies lessons. She hopes to take a few students on next year's tour.

"It was just wonderful to be able to walk through history, to make that connection to our past and realize what our ancestors had to go through to look at where we are now and where we were at one point and time," said Best, who went on the tour with her husband last year. "How we really made the growth and progress we should be making as a race."

Three tour buses carrying 160 people will leave Durham, Raleigh and Charlotte on Tuesday on a four-day, 1,800-mile trip through Atlanta, Alabama and Tennessee to retrace the steps of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights figures.

Stops include Tuskegee University, the National Voting Rights Museum, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the National Civil Rights Museum.

When the tour started in 2000, tour director Bruce Lightner thought it would be a one-time event.

But the requests for a second tour started pouring in and the Raleigh MLK Committee, along with the North Carolina Martin Luther King Resource Center, have held the event every year since then.

People from across the country and as far as England have been on the tour. Participants are mostly black, but whites, Hispanics and Asians have taken part, too. Lightner said the tour lets average people learn firsthand about the civil rights movement's true meaning. It also showed him how the South has changed.

"I had this block in my mind about how the Deep South was and I didn't want to go there, especially to Alabama," he said.

"But I saw that the people in these various places are warm and friendly and accommodating, and we've never experienced any disrespect or backlash from anywhere," he said. "I doubt that would have been the case 20, even 10 years ago."

Lightner's changed views reflect how the nation has changed regarding civil rights and race relations, he said. Some say the civil rights movement helped get Barack Obama elected president, said Lightner, who expects such discussions on this year's tour.

There are no strangers by the end of the trip, he said. Some have formed lifelong friendships. A few have gotten married.

Nelson Kerr still remembers his tour experiences from five years ago.

"When you set foot in those different places, it's just a feeling that comes across you that you can only experience by being there," said Kerr, a senior data processing technician at Duke University. "It felt like you were in the moment. You read about different events, including 'Bloody Sunday,' but to be on the bridge and go into the church that got bombed. It brings you closer to those events."

This year's tour is sold out, but if you're interested in going in 2010, go to www.king-raleigh.org/ncevent/detail.cfm?EVENT_ID=3058. Next year's tour will be from March 30 to April 2.