Hi, I am Sydney a junior CS and Mathematics major from Minnesota. The travel to Cambridge will be one I will never forget. Mostly because I have never traveled alone, or without family. A 9 person group of pretty inexperienced travelers had to make it to Cambridge and not get ripped off by the tourist traps, but also make it through customs, and the rails. It was a long trip, but one I gained many valuable skills from. When in doubt bother someone around you in the airport the worst they can say is I don’t know… or scam you. We arrived on Monday and had our first group dinner where we had the opportunity to eat our first authentic British fish and chips. We learned that traveling in our group of 27 really brings you back to kindergarten. Attempting to cross streets in a pack proved to be slightly difficult, and I am fairly sure we scared all the locals away. 

On Tuesday, June 21st, the whole program met up to break into groups of three for a scavenger hunt around Cambridge. I was handed a sheet with the initials of two other people on the trip. I had thought I met the majority of people, but I truly had no idea who these two names were. I didn’t have to do much searching; I think Sam and Nathan could tell when no one came up to them, and me staring around like a lost child, that I was the third member of their group. As we began small talking the usual where are you from blah blah blah. Through our small talk, we found our roles in the group. I was the street crosser; I would cross first as a sort of sacrifice and the other two would follow. Sam was the navigator; he had the map, and the most efficient path for us to go along to hit as many items on the list. Then there was Nathan; Nathan was somewhat forced into his role as the asker. We would make him ask locals questions when Sam and I didn’t want to. This came with randomly going into a Hilton hotel and asking if they knew where a Dinky Door was, what their address was, and then leaving with no explanation. 

The list consisted of finding the oldest and newest founded college gates, a bird least likely to find in Minnesota (no right answer), a punt, the largest bug in Cambridge, a grocery store, and as many DinkyDoors as we could. The main source of difficulty in our search is that we were not supposed to use google maps or any type of navigation app, and the more people we talked to the more points we would get. Something lovely about people in Cambridge is they really were inclined to help us, maybe we just got lucky in who we talked to, but they always were very excited to talk to us about what they thought certain answers were to other places we should visit on our walk. I believe that the scavenger hunt was supposed to be more difficult than it actually was for us, as the first group we talked to were so knowledgeable about every single item on the list. They were speaking to us in the heaviest accent so it was just the three of us trying to decipher the few keywords we needed from them. From them, we learned that the largest bug in Cambridge was the grasshopper/locus insect that rests on the Corpus Clock.

To prove that we found any of the items on the list we took photos and sent them in to be judged by the program leaders. Finding the majority of the items were reasonably easy however the Dinky Doors were more difficult to find. Many locals did not even know what a Dinky Door was or knew they had heard of it but had no idea where they could be. The DinkyDoors are “petite portals into other worlds, made with a dollop of humor to spark imaginations and make people smile.” The doors all have different themes and little stories behind them and have a wonderful website. We didn’t think we would care to find any of the doors, but they truly were so adorable that we became enthralled with finding the next one! The scavenger hunt took around two to three hours, however, there were many groups that exceeded that time having fun sightseeing or just getting to know one another.  My group for example ended up walking around 10 miles and stayed out for about 6 hours.