June 24-27, 2005
As if crossing the Atlantic and reuniting with my kids wasn't enough excitement for one week, we all topped it off by going camping in Wisconsin over the weekend with five other families that we know through Fermilab. When I was telling my aunt about leaving town just three days after flying back from Italy, she said "I just don't know how you do all of 
this". But when I got to the campsite I found out that one of the dads (pictured at left) got back from CERN (in Switzerland) less than 24 hours before he left for Wisconsin, and one family had yet to arrive because a mom was still at the US Particle Accelerator School at Cornell.
So given how hectic all of our lives are (of the twelve adults at the campsite, 10 were physicists and all were parents of two), it's not surprising that we spent a lot of 
the weekend just sitting around the campfire talking and goofing off with the kids in the field next to our group campsite. We certainly took a few hikes and hit the lake, but the schedule seemed gloriously relaxed. The kids of course had a blast because they got to play with their buddies from the Fermilab Children's center (and now from Fermilab Summer 
Camp). I brought my mandolin and worn-out copy of Rise Up Singing and played lots of old songs and learned a new one as well--Waltzing Mathilda, which I liked so much I was considering moving to Austrailia at one point in the weekend.
There are many many differences between working at a laboratory and working at a university, but one of the side effects of living near the laboratory that hosts your experiment is that your social life can end up revolving 
around other physicists on your experiment. Most of the people in this camping group know eachother because at least one person in each family is or was once on the CDF experiment, and their kids are or were at the Fermilab Children's Center. We're all bracing ourselves for the fact that two of the families who went camping this weekend are moving away from the lab over this summer: one family is moving to Massachussetts, and the other to Indiana. I guess that's the flip side of being at the lab and having this great pool of friends with lives like yours: you have to learn to deal with the fact that lots of them end up moving away to universities. Meanwhile we cope by trying to figure out a new camping place that we can all miraculously drive to next summer...
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