Destination: Ithaca, NY

We went to New York last weekend to find our housing for the fall. We drove to Ithaca on Sunday afternoon. We were expecting a 7.5 hour drive but it was only 5 hours! We made the whole trip on one tank of gas. The grocery store we shop at has a discount on gas for buying groceries there but we could never find a gas station that had diesel (which is what Sam's car needs). Finally we found one and we used the discount! You can do the math yourself, but that works out to be about 80 cents a gallon!

Right after we checked into our hotel, Sam told me to stop judging Ithaca based just on that. So we figured we should go see more of Ithaca. We decided to go walk around campus. Cornell is built on a hill. One giant hill. And campus is huge! Sam will probably be taking to bus to campus every day because parking is expensive (almost $700/year) and far away from the center of campus. I love the campus though. It was so beautiful.

On Monday morning we woke up early and went back to Cornell for an official tour of campus. I didn't really know what to expect. Since it is an Ivy League school I didn't know if everyone would be... condescending and spend the whole tour bashing other schools. There were a couple of jokes about Harvard but they weren't condescending at all! Everyone was so nice! After the tour we met an administrator who Sam has been in contact with. She was very nice and answered any questions we had.


Then came the stressful part of the day: finding housing. I have heard that laundry explodes when you have a kid and so I really wanted to be able to find an apartment with a washer and dryer. We ended up not getting that but the place we are moving has a 24 hour gym, on-site (coin operated, boo) laundry, and free cable and internet. It is also only a six minute bus ride to campus. And they let us sign a contract for two semesters instead of a full year! Hopefully we will enjoy living there!

One side of the kitchen

One of the bedrooms

Living room