Summer 1996
The Usual Routine
Most normal people would spend their summer vacation in traditional ways:
working some mediocre-paying job at a local mall, hanging out with some
friends (probably from high school), and yet another three months at home
with mom and dad. Work all day, go out at night, and try to finish the
summer a few dollars richer than when you started so that you can afford
your pizza habit back at school.
Change of Plans
Far be it for me to do anything remotely normal. Rather than have the
traditional summer vacation, I opted for something different: I chose to
stay at school. Now, before you think I'm totally nuts, I wasn't
here to take classes. I was here on a Howard Hughes Medical
Institute-sponsored summer fellowship for undergraduates. I was doing
the foundation research for my senior thesis. That's right, working in a
lab 50-plus hours a week for ten weeks, for $2500. Wow. Sounds like a
real winner, huh?
Were it not for the intervention of the Sussex Irregular Six, this place could have become excruciatingly boring. The Irregular Six (featured on my
Stuff page) were those of us who banded together to find things to do. We certainly weren't here for the money, and as for the experience, well, that could be had in grad school. So what the hell does one do in Newark, Delaware, on a Friday night when everything closes at 9 p.m.? Our first answer was the board game Advanced Civilization. If you've never played A-Civ, it's the board game upon which Civilization the computer game is based.
While A-Civ was certainly entertaining, it takes on the order of ten
hours to play, and attempting to play more than one game every two weeks
quickly turns your brain into Jell-O. Once, we all went to bed
at about 7 a.m. (which was just about the 24-hours-of-consciousness mark
for most of us) and then got up at about 4 in the afternoon on Saturday. This
can get detrimental to your health.
Card playing became the norm on weekday nights. Spades, Hearts,
Cribbage, whatever... we could play cards for a few hours and not get
bored. We also watched a disgustingly large number of movies. My friend
Jay and I are the recognized movie buffs in the Irregular Six, so we
usually made the selections. After a while, we started having theme
nights, like Kubrick Night ("Dr. Strangelove," "Full Metal Jacket," and
"2001: A Space Odyssey" back-to-back) and World War II Night ("The Great
Escape" and "The Bridge on the River Kwai").
Enter the Imps
At the end of June, most of us got roommates: exchange researchers from
Imperial College in London, England. Enter Mohammed, Stephen, Zeenab,
Sonia, and Kabi, affectionately dubbed "the Imps" by us, their American
counterparts. Most (I think all, actually) of them had never been to the
US before, and quite obviously, they wanted to travel. With a mischievous
glimmer in our eyes, we collectively said, "Sure, no problem."
So off we went. Every
weekend from the time they arrived until the end of the summer was
jam-packed with road trips to points all over the east coast. One of our
first destinations was New York City. We let Kristin drive a Chevy
Suburban through the Lincoln Tunnel with traffic coming in the other
direction. As the navigator in that particular vehicle, I can tell you
that this is an experience I don't wish to repeat anytime soon. Well, it
wasn't too bad; we only scraped the side barrier once. After New York was
Baltimore, and then our long-weekend camping trip with 15 miles of hiking
at Gettysburg National Military Park, pictured at left. In the photo,
from left to right are Kristin, myself, Laura Jane (front of cannon),
Dave (rear of cannon, now LJ's husband and unofficial seventh member of the
Irregular Six), Stephen, Zeenab, and Mohammed. Great trip: lots of hiking, historical perspective, and great camp food served up by yours truly.
And So It Goes...
I should mention that these trips were virtually free of charge to us.
Because we were doing our bit to "culturally enlighten" the Imps, the
University Undergraduate Research Office underwrote all of our travel
expenses. The cars from the University motor pool, the gas, parking fees,
and tolls didn't cost us a cent. We tried to schedule a trip to Six Flags
Great Adventure in New Jersey, but we couldn't convince the URO that a
theme park is a cultural experience. Over the 4th of July weekend, the
Imps and the rest of the Six went to Washington, D.C. (which I understand
the Imps found to be quite "fake")... I went to Columbus, Ohio... a long
and entirely different story.
Summer ran rapidly by. As
we neared the end of our 10 weeks in Newark, it occurred to someone that
we hadn't gone to the beach yet. Delaware has some particularly nice
beaches, notably Rehoboth, which are only about a two-hour drive from
Newark. Next-to-last weekend, off we went. Now, I should mention... we
split into two groups. The Imps headed to the beach. Then, there are
people like me--I've been to the beach so many times that I'm sick of it.
Enter Plan B: Cape Henlopen State Park, which is on the Delaware Bay and
has some truly impressive hiking trails. All told, we logged about 8.5
miles in a day. Pictured at right are Kristin, myself, and Jill, standing
next to the "No Standing" sign... Laura Jane was taking the picture.
All Good Things Must Come to an End
And so did our summer. In the first week of August it was time to pack up
and go home--where we enjoyed three weeks with the family instead of three
months--before heading back to Delaware yet again to begin the fall
semester, which was my next-to-last semester. The Imps stayed on for
another few weeks and then returned to London. We still hear from them
periodically, and the Irregular Six still hang out together on a
semi-irregular basis.
And you thought that summer in Newark, Delaware would be boring...
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URL: http://www.geocities.com/khornberger_1/summer96.html
Last Updated: 14 September 1999
