In the fall of 1999, Colorado Academy Fifth Grader Logan (Brown) Snow ’07 was headed to Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of CA’s long-running Scottish Exchange program. Aboard a British Airways jetliner, accompanied by her best friend and fellow CA exchange student, Grace McGlade ’07, and Lower School Principal Dr. Thomas Fitzgerald (“Dr. Fitz” to young and old alike), Snow could already taste freedom. She and McGlade facetiously ordered 50 cups of tea while Dr. Fitz slept, and then had to climb across seats full of other sleeping passengers to get to the plane’s bathroom. When they told the crew it was Fitz’s birthday—which was true—the British Airways staff woke him up by singing “Happy Birthday” over the intercom.
“I guess that’s why they chose the two of us for the program,” Snow recalls. “We were pretty gregarious—well, pretty wild—kids, and they probably thought we could handle being in a new environment so far from home at such a young age.”
Dr. Fitz and his Lower School colleagues were right; but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any culture shock for the two Fifth Graders from a forward-thinking school outside of Denver, where the Scottish Exchange program had been first established in 1981. The place they were going to attend classes for the next month—the formerly all-girls Mary Erskine School, founded in 1694, and now part of Erskine Stewart’s Melville Schools—was like nothing they had ever experienced: a highly traditional British secondary school aimed at preparing students for rigorous national exams and the career-focused specialization that follows.
A proper kilt, knee-high socks, a button-up blazer, and even a color-coordinated hair ribbon were all mandatory, notes Snow. There was rugby at lunch; there was black pudding (blood sausage) and haggis. Most shocking of all were the strictly structured curriculum and classroom environment—“There was to be no doodling on your paper, no looking out the window,” she recounts.
“CA suddenly felt so much more free, with its emphasis on creativity and fun and play, especially in the Lower School,” continues Snow. “My Fifth Grade teacher was Mrs. [Ruth] Larson, a wonderful teacher who’d read to us and we’d all be mesmerized, sitting on the floor in bean bag chairs or on pillows tucked inside laundry baskets.”
But for Snow, that stark contrast made an impression that continues to influence the course of her life decades later.
The sporty Watsons
CA’s Scottish Exchange program was the brainchild of former Lower School Principal Bill Sims, who had a longstanding commitment to international experiences for children; he bravely took Middle and Upper School students on a 21-day trip to China in the late 1970s. Sims saw the potential in establishing an annual student exchange program while working with a visiting British teacher, who later returned to become headmaster of the boys school next door to Mary Erskine’s, Daniel Stewart’s Melville College.
The first CA Scottish Exchange students traveled to Edinburgh in the fall of 1981, settling in with volunteer host families, and their counterparts from Erskine Stewart’s Melville Schools came to CA the following spring, spending their stay in turn with the CA exchange students’ families. For Snow, it is the connections between host families that were the most rewarding part of the entire experience.
Creating a full family profile was, in fact, a major part of the program’s application process, which happened in the spring. “We described our whole family: a typical day, what kind of sports and activities we liked,” she recalls. “My heritage is mostly Scottish, so we wrote all about that.” When she eventually made it to Scotland that fall, her host family took Snow to see the seat of Clan Mackintosh, her ancestors, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands.
The goal was to match a CA family with one in Scotland whose interests and temperaments matched theirs, and vice versa. Email had just gone mainstream at that time, so Snow and her parents were able to correspond electronically with the host family that had been chosen for them, the Watsons. Their connection was instant, and it only deepened when Snow met the two Watson girls, Rebecca, Snow’s exchange student, and her younger sister Sally, in person.
“They were very sporty, like us,” she says, “and we immediately clicked.” Field hockey and golf went a long way to bridging any cultural divide. But the Watsons had lived in the U.S. for a time and were well versed in all things American, a fact that made the transition nearly seamless for Snow. Food played a big role, too: The Watson matriarch, Maggie, is a talented cook, and Snow relishes the memory of the egg-and-bacon “baps” she’d make for breakfast.
Adding to the experience were the excursions the Watsons had planned for the CA student all over the country. The family owned a small house near historic St Andrews, the birthplace of golf, and Snow remembers many afternoons spent at the pub of another local course, the 19th Hole, enjoying Scottish grilled cheese sandwiches known as “toasties.”
When Rebecca Watson came to CA the following spring, Snow and her family made her visit just as memorable, with an itinerary full of “Western adventures.” They skied, visited the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and enjoyed defining Fifth Grade moments such as the overnight trip to the Crow Canyon Archeological Center. “Experiencing the more laid-back model of education at a place like CA, where classes included juggling and the dress code was long-gone, was so unique and enjoyable,” Watson observes.
The biggest revelation was being allowed to wear whatever she wanted to school. “At such a formative age, it was incredible to have the opportunity to embrace and be embraced by another culture and family,” she recalls.
Forever friends
Staying in touch by email and even a few airmail letters, Snow’s parents and her host parents hit it off, as well, eventually planning a vacation together in Colorado, and later traveling with the children as a group abroad. Snow kept in touch with Rebecca and Sally through high school and college, following their careers after they both were recruited to play collegiate golf in the U.S., while Snow went on to play field hockey at Middlebury.
“The friendship the exchange program built between our families was certainly the most valuable part of the experience.”
But life happens, and for a number of years Snow and the Watsons stayed in touch mostly via social media. Snow was headed toward an English teaching career, while the younger Watson sister, Sally, pursued professional golf, and Rebecca pursued business and accounting degrees on her way to a position managing investment client relationships.
In 2016, Snow was in the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English graduate program in Oxford, England, when she decided to make the train trip to visit the Watsons in Edinburgh. Even though it had been 15 years since Snow and Rebecca had seen each other, it was like the two friends had never been apart.
Coincidentally, Snow had met her future wife, CA English instructor Katherine Snow, while in the Bread Loaf program at Oxford, and a few more years later, when the two had their first child, Louise, and were making plans to attend a wedding near Edinburgh, Snow reached out to Rebecca once again to seek advice on kid-friendly hotels. She was thrilled to discover that her Scottish pal and her husband had had their own baby boy, Hamish, who was almost exactly the same age as Louise.
“Why don’t you just stay with us?” Rebecca asked the Snows, and a full circle was completed in the summer of 2024, when Rebecca, Chris, and Hamish hosted Katherine, Logan, and Louise in Edinburgh, almost 25 years since Logan’s last stay in the city. Snow reflects on the time together, “We just toured around with our strollers, going by the old school and taking pictures. It was so interesting to compare our different experiences of becoming moms—the system for maternity care and leave in Scotland is amazingly generous. Still, I feel like our lives ended up following a very parallel trajectory.”
Returning to Scotland prompted other reflections, too. “So much of my learning on the exchange program happened outside of the classroom—our Highlands adventures and learning about Mary, Queen of Scots, and visiting Edinburgh Castle. I think that idea of learning through travel stayed with me throughout my education.” In college, she recounts, when her friends were all going to Europe to study abroad, she decided on Vietnam. “I wanted to do something that really pushed me. I took Vietnamese and lived with a Vietnamese roommate who was my age. I’m still in touch with her, and she has kids around the same age as Louise, as well.”
CA, Snow believes, inspired her to think in a global way—beyond herself and the limits of her own experience. “Going to Scotland made me curious about difference. It was the start of a process for me of trying to understand the world and my small place in it.”