Bean Town to Notre Dame

I have to admit ~ it took a lot less time that I thought it would to go completely insane while driving home from New Hampshire to South Bend. I had stopped at a friend's lake house for a night of rest and recuperation before I was to attempt the 15 hour trip back to the Midwest. Despite being armed with 5 hours of Spanish lessons on my ipod ~ in no time I was engaging in wonderfully insightful and captivating conversation with myself . I passed through some beautiful places ~ Vermont being the highlight ~ and the drive actually went quicker than I thought it would ~ thanks largely to consuming enough coffee to kill a small horse.

Once back at Notre Dame we began to settle in properly to our new surroundings. Just prior to leaving for NY we had pooled our resources with a friend from the program and the three of us had moved into a townhouse together. It was a pretty amazing lifestyle upgrade ~ having just been built a year or two ago, and includes a garage (yes that's a big deal) and is so close to ND you can see the campus. So, as we now settle down for another semester ~ we have begun carefully planning the next trip…

Pictured: The Lake House, Vermont, and our new digs…

Summer in New York

So the insanity of a few months on the East coast took its toll ~ and this blog was one of the many victims ~ but we are back in sleepy South Bend and with the corn growing slowly I have time to relax and make a few notes on our time in New York.

It began with a whirlwind twelve-hour drive to New York ~ pleasant and scenic for the first two hours ~ then ten hours of torture. We made it to our new home for summer just north of the city in Hastings on Hudson ~ a town along the river where we would be minding a friends cat in exchange for staying at her townhouse. Fortunately, the cat is 15 years old and moves about two-feet per day ~ making it a very easy job. We were also surprised to find that our new home had a nature reserve as a back garden ~ complete with deer and a resident woodchuck ~ so not exactly the city living from last year in New York.

The next six weeks were packed with work and sight-seeing ~ the sort of schedule that is a lot of fun but takes a year or two off your life. This year we pulled in every contact known to man ~ and managed to find our way into a taping of the Daily Show ~ our preferable news source ~ and then a tour of CNN and the floor of the Stock Exchange. With the benefit of our car we made day trips to the Hamptons, Fire Island and Connecticut ~ and visited family in Philly. We also managed to catch a game at the soon-to-be demolished Yankee Stadium ~ and tracked down the only English and Australian fish-n-chip shops in NYC (The Aussie tucker was much better of course).

The summer flew by ~ next stop was Los Angeles for Jen and Boston for me ~ before we would both meet back in Indiana to start another semester.

Pictured: Our ‘back-garden’, sunset across the Hudson, and the Yankee’s game.