I guess it would be fair to say that Cornell is the last of the Ivies I've gotten to visit. I did drive through campus on a little road trip with my mom and dad in 2003, but that hardly counts in my opinion. Wow, it’s hard to believe that was 13 years ago already! I somehow tend to forget Cornell is part of the Ivy League. Situated well inland from the Atlantic Coast in central New York, it seems a completely different place than the sister schools in New England and New York to Philadelphia area. Being from the New York City area, I’ve always considered what lies north and west of the Catskills to be virtually the Midwest rather than the Northeast.

Cornell has a huge campus, much bigger than the other Ivies from what I can tell . After I entered and picked up a map at an information booth, it felt like I was driving for well over a mile to my destination at the art museum through a small city of a campus. Some of Cornell’s schools are actually state run, something people at the other Ivies tend to look down on. How elite can a school that has major agricultural and veterinary programs and a school of hospitality and hotel management really be?

Cornell has a quite significant art collection for a university in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, housed in a modernistic tower that strikes me as particularly inefficient exhibition space with just a few galleries on each floor of a multi-story tower. I think many smaller museums try to make a statement with their impressive architecture to make up for their sometimes small collections. But the Johnson Museum has a significant amount of good stuff to show off, particularly Asian art and late 19^th century and 20^th century modernism.

Afterwards I took a walk around campus, or at least a small part of the older historic area of the massive campus . Cornell has a significant diversity of architectural styles in contrast to the more unified character of Princeton, Duke, U Penn, or Yale, but is quite attractive nonetheless. What impressed me most about Cornell’s campus is its rather dramatic location on a hillside high above the city of Ithaca with great views of the town and the southern end of Cayuga Lake. I imagine "The Hill" to be a bitterly cold and windy place in winter, but I didn’t get that feel at all on a hot day in June.

Ithaca is situated at the southern end of Lake Cayuga in a gorge carved by the same glacier that gouged out the lake, resulting in the town being surrounded by hills on three sides and the lake on the other with fine scenery all around. The town of Ithaca frequently makes it onto lists of the best small cities in America to live in, as college towns frequently do. I found the center to be attractive with a downtown pedestrian mall called Ithaca Commons that reminded me just a little of Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado . Maybe that’s because I was there on a warm sunny day with Colorado like weather.

Situated between the Allegheny Plateau and the Great Lakes Plain, Ithaca is surrounded by many significant waterfalls. I drove north along the west shore of Cayuga Lake to Taughannock Falls State Park with the intent to hike the Gorge Trail through the park to the falls. Taughannock Falls is the highest single drop waterfall in the eastern U.S. and an impressive site. Unfortunately, the Gorge Trail was closed for maintenance, but I was at least able to drive up to the overlook for a view of the falls. I guess I never realized there were so many scenic wonders in Upstate New York.

One of the things that surprised me on my drive to Ithaca through Cortland and Tompkins Counties is the large number of “Plain People”, as the Amish and Mennonites are known, in the area. I’ve never associated Upstate New York with the Amish, and it’s apparently a relatively new phenomenon to see women in long dresses, men in dressed black suits and hats, and horse drawn buggies in the area. As their population has grown in established areas like Lancaster County, the Amish have established new communities in other areas where farmland is cheaper and more available, including several areas of Upstate New York.