verbatim: We Are Headed North

Happy New Year, everyone!

We survived the bomb-cyclone but decided it still wasn't quite cold enough here in Boston, so we've decided to get up tomorrow morning while it's still dark and drive 200 miles northeast. Yes, it's time to take Pete up to Waterville, Maine, for his second semester at Colby, but really his first semester AT Colby.

Pete got back from Spain just 3 weeks ago. He had a great semester but was definitely ready to come home. He spent his break mostly seeing his friends and working. (Did I ever mention that he started working at Heartbreak Hill Running Company last summer? There are three locations, and he loves being surrounded by runners.) But now it's time to head up to campus.

First he has his freshman orientation, a key part of which is known as COOT (Colby Outdoor Orientation Trips). The kids who started on campus in the fall did hiking, kayaking, that sort of thing. But the kids from GES (Global Entry Semester—Salamanca or Dijon) will be experiencing Iced COOT, and Pete is doing ice climbing. So I will just shut up about the cold for now. (And if anyone is interested in buying any outdoor gear at L.L. Bean, you can forget about it because we bought EVERYTHING.)

After that is Jan. Plan, which is a month-long intersession where kids take just one class. There's everything from meditation or African music on campus to fly-fishing in Bermuda to language immersion in Italy and so on. Students are required to do Jan. Plan for three out of their four years, but we're told that most kids do all four because it's so much fun (some kids' study abroad programs interfere with it). It's a whole month of being on campus with all your friends but having only one class! The GES kids were advised to take an academic course to kind of get their feet wet, so Pete is doing Intro to Greek and Roman Archaeology. At the same time he will be getting up to speed (haha) with the track team, as the winter season is already under way! In fact, he'll be missing a meet when he's hanging from a cable above a snowy peak ice climbing. Then the second semester begins the second week of February.

One last thing: When Pete arrived at JFK, he had a few hours to kill before his shuttle to Logan. It was during that time that he realized he didn't have his laptop—and that the last he'd seen of it was when he put it on the conveyer belt in the Madrid airport security line! He had apparently been flustered after getting frisked and then tried to quickly gather all his stuff, and neglected to wait for it to come out of the x-ray machine. We first called the airport and got the number for the lost and found office (objetos perdidos). Then we called and called and called and it rang and rang and rang. We tried for days, at all times of day or night, but nothing. So we called back the first number and got an email address instead. We composed an email in Spanish that described the laptop—a silver MacBook with a sticker that says "Cannon Mountain" and a pink whale sticker (from Vineyard Vines) and a blue zippered case, etc. We very quickly got back an email that said they had "an object that matched our description"! All we had to do was come pick it up. Um. We said that we are in Boston and they said we could just send someone to get it. Um. (The University of Salamanca is 2+ hours from Madrid, or else I would've asked the Colby program directors if one of them could get it for us.) So they gave us the information for a Mail Boxes Etc. office in Madrid (as well as another courier company that we'd never heard of; I figured it made sense to go with a company that has a U.S. presence just in case we ran into trouble). We emailed them, and they said they'd need us to fill out an authorization form and send a copy of Pete's passport, then they'd go get it, and only THEN would they tell us how much it would cost to get it back. But we had no other options and nothing to lose, so we did. The next day they had it and said the cost of retrieving it and packing it all up and shipping it via FedEx with expedited service would be €109.44 (which came out to $134.47—I would've gladly paid more rather than have to replace it!). Two days later, a very carefully wrapped package was delivered to our front door! The Mac was in fine shape—it still had 70% battery, and when Pete opened it, it was still on the web page where he had ordered our Star Wars tickets for the day after he got home! The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that we got it back. I guess if you're going to leave your computer anywhere in the entire country of Spain, the ideal spot is at airport security. Anywhere else and it surely would have gotten snatched. Isn't that a nice story?