Ithaca

For those of you who didn't already know, I recently moved from Fairbanks, Alaska to Geneva, New York. I still live in a rural area, but I'm much closer to the comforts of civilization than I was in Fairbanks. While not everything about Alaska was terrible, I'm definitely happy to move on and start to settle myself here in the Finger Lakes area of New York. Now that I am here in NY, I'm planning on sharing my adventures in and explorations of the area with you.

I came to New York to teach at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a ranked and prestigious liberal arts college. I don't know why they hired me either, but I'm smart enough to jump at a good thing when it's offered to me!

In the 3 weeks that Sancho and I have been in the area, we've already done a lot. Natalie came to visit and help us get settled for about 10 days, and I'll publish posts soon about all the work we did (it mostly has to do with painting...Natalie's an amateur interior designer extraordinaire).

While Natalie was here we did find some time to play. We took a hike, visited some wineries, and drove down to Ithaca to do some shopping. I'll post about the hiking and wineries later...today's reserved for Ithaca.

It only took us about 45 minutes or so to drive from my home on the shore of Seneca Lake to Ithaca, which is on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake. A lot of the drive was along one lake shore or the other, and we got to drive through some quaint little villages like Ovid and Interlaken. We also stumbled upon the opening of the Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in Trumansburg.

Once we got to Ithaca we drove directly to The Commons to do some shopping, where we were pretty successful. Natalie found a dress for her sister's birthday gift, and we picked up a dozen books for about $75 at a used book store. The best part, though, was the Thai food we had for lunch (unfortunately there's not a Thai restaurant in Geneva!!). We had been warned by the person who suggested we visit the area that Ithaca was "crunchy" or "granola"...and it definitely was. While a lot of the shops were unique and cool, they weren't really our style. Or it could have been that the 107 degree heat index sapped our shopping enthusiasm after just a couple hours.

To wrap up our visit to Ithaca, we drove through the campus of Cornell University. While we weren't very impressed with the surrounding neighborhoods, the campus itself was a beautiful mix of old and modern architecture, sprinkled with lots of green parks and quads.

All in all, it was a cool place to visit for an afternoon. But if it weren't for the fact that it has the closest Thai restaurant (or the cool used book store), I'm not sure I'd need to go back.