Days 12, 13 & 14 - Colgate continued

So our (or rather Lewis's) rash promise of daily updates has this week been harder to fulfill, with a busy travel and debate schedule. Apologies to the many of you for whom the last few days have been incomplete your daily dose of our tales from America. Updates for the last week will now follow soon, and we will try and keep updates as close to daily as possible!

So Tuesday was our first full day in Colgate, and the day was spent coaching, debating and eating with the Colgate debaters. We ran some workshops on different debates strategy, which, due to interesting and interested nature of the Colgate debaters, were great fun. In the evening we did a BP style debate with some of the Colgate teams, on THW negotiate with terrorists. It was a lively and interesting debate, and is also one of the ones on our list of motions which we'll be doing again on tour, so was good to try it out and find it to be a good one. Afterwards, we went for a really wonderful meal (probably our favourite food on tour so far) with our Colgate host John and his lovely family., and then returned to Hamilton for some drinks with some of the debaters.

Wednesday was our final day in New York state and with the guys at Colgate. In the morning we ran another workshop (on opp strategy and also on prep time and building a case anyone is particuarly curious...). After lunch, we headed to 'Turning Stone', a casino and resort run by the Native American 'Oneida tribe'. They are exempt from lots of laws, including on gambling ages and taxes. Lewis, as an avid poker player, was particularly excited. After a few spins on the roulette wheels with very limited success, Austin and Lewis played a few hands of poker (largely unsuccessfully...Lewis claims this was due to the fact he couldn't play for long enough to reach his peak or something, though I'm pretty sure this isn't true...).

After returning from the casino, we had the second of our public debates, this time a 1 vs. 1 format, on the motion “This House Would not allow extremist speakers to speak on University campuses”. It was an interesting debate, and fun to mix up the format a bit (we both gave 7, then 5 minute speeches). After the debate we headed out for a fun final night in Hamilton with some of the Colgate team, for 'Trivia' night at a local pub. Our contributions may have been limited, but Lewis's Bond film knowledge is pretty impressive.

Thursday started with a phone call from John to tell us that our flights to Pittsburgh had been cancelled..There were heavy storms on the N.E. coast, so lots of flights through NYC (like ours) were cancelled. We got an alternative route and new and slightly later flights, though this time through Atlanta in Georgia. This seemed quite counter-intuitive, as Georgia is only state up from Florida and thus is pretty southern, wheras Pennsylvania, our final destination, is just one state below NY... We had lunch in Syracuse with John, and then made a quick stop in a shopping mall before catching our flight (Lewis got extremely excited by the discovery of H&M, which had probably been the thing he was missing most from the UK). Bar having to run through Atlanta airport to make our connection in the 10 minute window between our arriving and departing flights, and my growing sense of carbon footprint guilt, our journey was smooth and we were met in Pittsburgh by Allison.

Allison, a graduate student in the Department of Communication, took us to a bar for some food and drinks with Amber and Odile, also grad students, and also our opponents in the debate the following day. After a great meal, we headed to bed, ready for three debates the next day!

(Photos: Colgate campus; Austin playing poker; Us & Colgate at Trivia night; Breakfast at the hotel in Colgate)