Orientation for the Class of 2011, held Aug. 27–Sept. 6, helped ease first-year students into Bates life by offering something for everyone: meeting returning students while lugging belongings into residence halls, exploring Maine's Great North Woods by canoe, enjoying barbecues and inflatables, and considering Bates historian John Cole's sly, earthy Convocation talk about the correspondence between the teenage Marie Antoinette and her mother, Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. In this slide show we share a few of these experiences.