Last summer, I moved from the US to the UK. This summer, somehow I scheduled three separate trips from the US to the UK. Here’s the story.

Trip 1: Both Coasts

This summer, the Liberal Arts Computer Science (LACS) Consortium met at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia. I’ve been a member for about ten years, and hosted the annual meeting at Whitman in 2017, when I was pregnant with my daughter.

It wasn’t an obvious decision to go. The annual LACS meeting is held over two days, so it was a long trip for a short meeting. And I wasn’t sure about the value of attending, since I couldn’t give much of an update about Whitman and I’m no longer working at a liberal arts college.

What finally swayed me? Two things. First, this is a group to which I have a long attachment. I realized I wanted to go if only to say goodbye. Second, when I actually investigated flights, I realized I could visit a friend in the Bay Area at modest extra cost.

I’m glad I went. It was good to see old friends. The membership agreed there is precedent for my remaining a LACS member even though I’m no longer working at Whitman. As I was reminded, LACS is a group of individuals, not institutions. I didn’t have much to say about Whitman, but I could say that CS enrollments are steady, unlike at many US institutions. I contributed to the report on the Essential Computing Concepts (ECC) project, for which there is a SIGCSE Virtual 2026 Working Group underway.

My one regret was joining the group for “a walk in the woods” after the official end of the meeting. The Swarthmore campus is lovely, but the long walk on uneven ground badly aggravated my freshly diagnosed posterior tibial tendinitis. It was poor judgment on my part to participate.

Fortunately, visiting my friend was an opportunity to rest and recuperate. However, I’m still coping with the tendinitis. With all my summer travel, I only got to see an NHS physiotherapist at the beginning of this week. He predicted up to three more months of recovery.

Trip 2: Walla Walla

The second trip was actually scheduled first, when registration for Farm Camp coincided with a spring airfare sale. We signed Gwendolyn up for a week of Farm Camp along with her Walla Walla best friend, Theo. This was a family trip, and it included visiting both sets of grandparents. However, it was also a working vacation: both Brooks and I planned to work weekday mornings when our daughter was at camp. With her new swimming skills, Gwendolyn looked forward to spending time at Memorial Pool. Brooks and I looked forward to catching up with a few of our closest Walla Walla friends and eating as many breakfasts as possible at Bacon & Eggs.

We arrived on schedule at PDX and spent the night at an airport hotel. We left Gwendolyn with my in-laws to spend a couple nights on our own at Skamania Lodge. (Our anniversary trip, I suppose, although our anniversary was more than a week later.) We drove on to Walla Walla, had dinner with my parents, and dropped a very excited kid off at Welcome Table Farm on Monday morning.

That would be the only day she spent on the farm. We arrived in Walla Walla just in time for the worst wildfire smoke of the summer, blowing east from the Grasshopper fire. Gwendolyn had hoped to go to Memorial Pool several times, but in the end Brooks only got to take her once. We ended up leaving Walla Walla a day early to return to my in-laws’ house where the smoke was not quite as bad.

Fortunately, though, we all agreed the real goal was for Gwendolyn to spend time with Theo. On the worst days, Farm Camp became “Town Camp” at the AirBnB owned by the Welcome Table Farm family. Two other days, Farm Camp went on with plenty of indoor activities, as well as N95 masks to filter the smoke outdoors. Theo’s mom preferred to keep him home, but was happy to have Gwendolyn over for play dates, so they got to spend even more time together.

What was I working on while Gwendolyn was playing? Three big things. First, I had scheduled lunch or coffee dates to catch up with several colleagues who were in town. Second, I had to clear out my office and return my office keys. Third, I had volunteered to serve as a meta-reviewer for both SIGCSE 2027 and SIGCSE-V 2026, not realizing the discussion period for both review timelines would fall over this one week. And it was my first experience as a meta-reviewer. (My friend Amy wrote a blog post on the meta-reviewing experience a week or so later.) So it truly was a working vacation, emphasis on “working.”

Cleaning out my office was strange. I had already packed up most of what I wanted to move when visiting over Easter Break. I donated three more boxes of books to the AAUW book sale, beyond the uncountably many we had already donated from clearing out our house to get it ready to sell. I left a number of textbooks, along with a few pieces of furniture, for my colleagues to use or dispose of. I packed up one more box of files, which I left at my in-laws’ house, shredding or recycling the rest. That truly felt like the end of an era. However, I also got to pack up the magnetic marble track that had been hanging off the side of my file cabinet. I left that with my in-laws too, but not before Gwendolyn played with it at our VRBO. Finally, I took the opportunity to photograph some memorabilia that belonged to the department.

Clearing out my office took longer than I thought it would – largely because the conference reviewing needed to get done, too. But on Saturday, when I finally dropped my office keys in the dropbox, I felt grateful to have that moment alone.

Trip 3: Claremont

The third trip was the last to be scheduled, squeezing in just before a weekend at the beach with family and friends followed by Gwendolyn’s first day of school.

Julie Medero, the new chair of computer science at Harvey Mudd College (HMC), reached out to my colleague Amanda Holland-Minkley about inviting a member of the MAP-CS team to lead a curriculum design workshop just before the start of their fall semester. Amanda forwarded her email to the team, but doubted anyone could travel so close to the start of their own fall semester. As a Harvey Mudd alumna, naturally I volunteered myself. I doubted they would pay for my travel from the UK, but Julie convinced her administration it was worth it.

This was a super quick trip, just four nights: an evening arrival, a relaxed day to adjust to the new timezone and meet with Julie, two intense workshop days, and then one more night to recuperate before catching a return flight to Denver and from there back to London. Still, in that time I managed to see friends, walk around Claremont, and even buy my daughter a Lego set at Boon Companion Toys, which has been in the Claremont Village for as long as I can remember.

Betwixt and Between

There were about ten days between my first two US trips. I returned from the first trip just in time for the year’s final Congregation at King’s and my daughter’s last day of school. During the following week at work, I pushed the ECC working group forward, wrote a promotion and tenure letter, updated my web site and CV, wrote a blog post, and shared news of my resignation from Whitman on LinkedIn and Facebook. At home, Brooks and I carted Gwendolyn back and forth from two different day camps (which they call “holiday clubs” here in the UK) and took her to see two different Horrible Histories shows at the Cambridge Arts Theatre.

There were also about ten days between my last two US trips. At work, I frantically prepared for the HMC CS workshop, with a lot of support from the MAP-CS team. At home, we finally received our shipment of belongings from the US. To wring a bit more fun out of the short summer break, Brooks and I took Gwendolyn to London for a visit to Hampton Court Palace while she remains obsessed with the Tudors. We also saw a live performance of My Neighbour Totoro, which was really quite remarkable.

It’s now been about ten days since I returned from Claremont. We spent the aforementioned weekend at the beach. Gwendolyn and I had a quiet day at home before her first day of school, and then a very busy weekend after. We bought more IKEA furniture and started unpacking, first our game collection and then Gwendolyn’s books.

During Gwendolyn’s first two days of school, I attended my first UKICER. It was right here in Cambridge, so how could I not go? Most of it was interesting but not extremely relevant to my new role. There is one paper on implementing the Danish computing curriculum that I want to look up in relation to the ECC project. However, I made new friends, and even saw a few old friends too.

By contrast, this week at work has been very quiet. After getting myself reoriented and experiencing my first ever annual performance evaluation meeting (!), I decided to tackle my digital move from Whitman. This will be the topic of my next blog post.