I'm starting to dislike my alarm. Woke up today at 5:30, packed up and left the hotel. We caught a cab from NYC to the airport. Waited around the airport for a while for our flight to Syracuse, which left at 8:30. We got to Syracuse around 9:30 and rented a car. It's about an hour drive from Syracuse to Ithaca, on highways and rural roads out in the middle of nowhere. (Officially, the "Finger Lakes" region of New York.) Everything is still covered in snow, it snowed out here a few days ago, and it looks (and feels) a lot more like February than April.

We got to Ithaca College around 11:30 and explored the campus for a half hour until the tour started. Take an online tour, that way I don't have to go over everything. The tour took a little over an hour, and covered the entire campus. The college itself is similar in some ways to Central Washington University in the way the buildings are set up. They don't really have much of an engineering program, but they have great Communications, Music, and Audio Technology programs. The buildings are all new within the last 40 years, many seem newer than that. There are different housing options and quite a few places to eat on campus, but the campus itself is relatively small, has little or no graduate study, and is set off a ways up the hill from downtown Ithaca. After the campus tour, we ate lunch at the campus food court, then took a tour of the Communications building, with the radio, TV, journalism, and audio/video programs. The audio and video prouction programs look interesting, that might be a way of combining music with technology.

After we left Ithaca College, we headed through town to Cornell. We are staying at the Statler Hotel on campus, the hotel is part of the college of hotel administration. The hotel is nice, and I figured out how to get into the internet about 20 minutes ago, although we get several of Cornell's wireless networks, none of them are strong enough out here to connect to. We have a great view of the main quad from our room, nearby are the arts quad and the engineering quad. Most of the housing is a 10 minute walk across the river, but its not too bad to walk around the campus when the wind isn't blowing. We spent over 2 hours wandering around campus. Take a virtual tour here! I realized that taking picures of all the buildings on campus is pretty much a waste, since almost all the schools have online tours like this one. Try it, maybe you'll see a few places I visited.

Came back to the hotel after the walk and rested up, then we went downstairs to the restaraunt for dinner. It was very good, lots of food. I'm full! It's about 9:00 here, but I've been up for a long time already, so I'll probably go to bed early. I'll describe Cornell more tomorrow after I take a guided tour of campus and go to the information sessions for the college of arts and sciences and the university as a whole. Should also get a chance to explore the town of Ithaca tomorrow. I'll be online for the next hour or so, unless I'm not. So there. Ha. Better not snow / rain / sleet tomorrow, it was nice today (by nice, I mean sunny, and it eventually came above freezing to almost 45 in the sun, before windchill.) I'll get another post in tomorrow.