Today we start with a visit to the 4th oldest private Ivy League research university in the country, Princeton, NJ, founded in 1746. We take the bicycles from the parking lot and ride up to the campus which in fact is a 2.4 km2 area (or a little town). Walking through the buildings and classrooms threw me back 47 years reminding me of my own time in the holly halls of wisdom at my university. But here it has another gravity to it, because of its age, the quality of teaching, and the kind of people who were educated here. Presidents, supreme court justices, senators, and scientists like James Madison (4th US President), Woodrow Wilson (28th US President), John F. Kennedy (35th US President), James Stewart (American actor and military aviator), Michelle Obama, Jeff Bezos, Brooke Shields, Donald Rumsfeld, Queen Noor Al Hussein, and many others. And as a special feed today was the admission day for the 2025 class. Lots of speeches, many proud students, and even more proud parents.
Nassau Hall
After that, we moved out of Princeton, NJ on Hwy-206 to find Hwy-202 to bring us through the state of New York into Connecticut. The roads in New York are as bad as ever, and with all the construction works we lost a couple of times our bearings, and hitting end of day traffic made the moving a stop and go exercise. When we finally crossed I-84 we went onto the Interstate, but this wasn't a better idea and Also here it was stop and go traffic, and the last 80 miles took us almost three hours. But with a good sushi dinner at our favorite place at our former home place, some cold wine, all is quickly forgotten and the day ends on a positive note.
"Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue." - John Witherspoon, 18th century intellectual
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