After unloading the Tahoe of luggage for the last time, we caught a cab to New York University (NYU) which is downtown in Greenwich Village. The routine is exactly the same on all of these college tours.....first comes the "Information Session" which lasts for an hour and runs through the usual stuff - make up of the university, heritage, admissions, financial aid packages, etc, etc, blah, blah....even Brandon knows the stuff off by heart.....occasionally the pitch is interspersed with a few jokes - the speaker at Yale told us about a candidate who obviously had spell-checked but not proof-read their "personal statement" essay....which told of how he loved to torture children. He was happy torturing kids in 5th & 6th grades and had been torturing them for years. The student had obviously meant to write "tutor".....however, we were then told exactly the same story in another info session at a different school the following day...
Then follows the tour....NYU is unusual in that its campus occupies several buildings across various streets in the same area - so some student residences are above Starbucks for example. The whole university is integrated into the city itself giving it a real urban feel
Next we went to see Columbia which is uptown Manhatten and is one of the eight Ivy League colleges. A very different experience ! Here, there is an identifiable campus although it is still very much part of the city. Elizabeth and I liked it much more than we expected - the buildings are beautiful and the tour was pretty cool - although the info session was still extremely dull (the only highpoint came when the speaker asked which name might be missing from the list of notable writers and philosophers whose names are engraved around the top of the library building. Who should come after - Virgil, Socrates, Plato, Homer.....and Cody whispered "how about "Marge"...) 
This morning we drove across the border from New York into the 14th and final US state on our road trip - New Jersey - to visit another Ivy League college....Princeton. The campus here is absolutely breathtaking - by far the prettiest that we have seen (and that's really saying something). Another very competitive college as far as admissions are concerned but Harley liked it so it'll probably be on "the list". Once again, it's impossible to go into too much detail here about every university that we've visited on this trip - all eleven of them. So if anyone reading this wants (or knows anyone else who might want) to speak to Elizabeth or I direct - just email us on elizabeth@hub-media.net or gary@hub-media.net We'll be pleased to hear from you.
Tomorrow we start to explore NYC but before that, we had one final stop.....Hertz car rental in Manhatten.......to drop off the Chevy Tahoe - 4,563 miles later. As you can see, the boys were really sorry to see her go.....
