By Michael Burke,
associate professor of English

They'll do their Colby Outdoor Orientation Trip in Maine when they arrive on campus for second semester. But first-year students in the Colby in London program already have gone on the first Welsh version, fondly known by participants as "WOOT."

Twenty-two first-year students, four juniors (pictured right) and one professor arrived at Gatwick Airport in London on Aug. 28 and immediately headed by coach for the Pembrokeshire National Coastal Park, the most rural and wild part of the Welsh coast. They arrived at the tiny village of Mathry (one-room schoolhouse, one phone booth, one business, one pub) in late afternoon and stayed four nights at an adventure center. The weather was glorious each day, which by all local accounts was remarkable.

The students split into groups for activities including sea kayaking, visiting the 900-year-old Cathedral of St. David and "coasteering"--a Welch invention involving wetsuits, helmets, tall rocks, cold water and swimming with the seals. On subsequent days students hiked along the coast, talked late into the night in the lodge, rode horses and mountain-biked to an extinct volcano on a headland.

"Sea kayaking was serene, peaceful, [it] let me think," said Nathan Shinagawa '05 of Santa Rosa, Calif. If COOTs are meant to ease students' transition to college life, create bonds and allow for interesting outdoor experiences, the first WOOT, no watered down version, was wildly successful.