Travel to Dartmouth today. Woke up at 6:15... uggh. What happened to sleeping in during spring break? Left Cornell and Ithaca behind and travelled to the Syracuse airport for our 10:00 flight to Newark. Everything went fine until we checked in for the flight and found that mom had been dropped from the e-ticket reservations because she hadn't shown up... for the flight that didn't leave for another hour and a half. Got that fixed in about fifteen minutes, but it may be a problem heading home on Saturday. Because her ticket was different, she was flagged for a search at security. Meanwhile, I've found that taking my trombone mouthpiece out of my carry-on (it looks a bit suspicious through the X-Ray machine) and putting it in the bin with my wallet and phone keeps me from having to unpack every time i go through security.

The flights were uneventful, both were on the same small airplane and took about 45 minutes. We arrived in sunny Manchester, NH around 1:00. Picked up the luggage (the plane was too small to carry on everything) and spent a half-hour trying to get the rental car. The conversation went something like this: "Yeah, we have a reservation for Vines, a full sized car. Umm, we're all out of those, how about a small car? No... We paid for a full sized car. Oh. Well, we don't have any of those left... Eventually, we got a Jeep. Not bad, but still, wouldn't you think that by reserving a rental car, they might have one for you?

The rental place had no maps or directions, so we found a gas station with a decent map of New Hampshire. The town of Hanover (90% of which is Dartmouth College) is about an hour away from Manchester, along the Vermont border. We got to Dartmouth and found our hotel around 3:00. After tea in the cafe downstairs, we went out and wandered around the campus. We walked for a few hours and probably saw almost the entire campus. Most of the buildings are labled with just the name of the hall and don't give much in the way of what department they house. Actually, almost all of the buildings look like dorms, or the dorms look like the classrooms, I suppose it goes both ways. It's a good day to be out on campus, as the temperature finally climbed into the 50's and the sun came out for part of the day.

We had dinner at a restaraunt a few blocks from our hotel. Out the window in the hotel is the center of campus, so everything is nearby, much like at Cornell. The Dartmouth campus is a lot smaller than Cornell, and yet it seems harder to get around and more difficult to get a feel for what is where. For example, the map doesn't help a lot. Maybe the tour and info session (starting to know exactly what to expect with these) will help a bit. Thanks to the location in the center of campus, I have a great wireless internet connection in the hotel, not sure how it is in the rest of campus. I'll post a good overview of Dartmouth tomorrow, along with whatever else I end up doing. It's unlikely I'll spend the whole day here, the town itself is only a few blocks long.