@MaineLonghorn
Are you familiar with My Bus Home? http://www.mybushome.com/
I’m not sure if any of the schools are close to your daughter but if any are it’s a great service. We’ve used it several times to get DD between Rochester, NY and NJ.
I see a couple of posts that mentioning that kids got stuck at airports and had to stay in a hotel. How does that work? Can someone under 21 check into a hotel themselves? Thanks
Yes, most hotels permit guests 18 or over to check in. Depending on the circumstances, some are amenable to 16 year olds with parental permission travelling solo.
Two children both chose to attend school on the opposite coast. Both school and home are located near airports so getting to and from the airport was not an issue. No weather delays in the last 6 years on any flights. My children did come home for major holidays. I do think we met half way one Easter.
Summer storage units, climate controlled!, made moving in and out easy. I will add we moved child 1 in for freshman year, once when returning from abroad, and out senior year. The rest she handled by herself with friends. ( okay moving in and out was easy for the parents).
We visited each fall for parents weekend.
Less than half the kid’s at my son’s school came home for Thanksgiving. They did a really nice communal meal and had lots of activities planned for the kids who stayed at school. He’s in a major city so flights home at non-holiday times are not bad. We are meeting somewhere for a family vacation for spring break so that’s easy. My daughter’s BF is going to a rural school and I promised her 1 trip per year for him to visit her or vice versa. The flights out of a small airport about an hour away are about twice as much as flying my son home the same distance. They also have shuttle from campus to the airport which is $85 each way so that adds on quite a bit. My daughter had considered a rural school that was almost 2 hours from the nearest reasonable sized airport but they allow students to have cars there even freshman year so that would have been doable (unless there was bad weather which is a possibility in that area of the country).
As a college student I went abroad for 8 months. I loved every second of it and don’t recall being homesick at all. Now as a parent, I fell a bit guilty that I rarely called home, (I was very good with postcards though,) but in those ancient times, calling home meant a mountain of local coins and cost a fortune. My parents never complained when I finally returned home after eight months. They never said a word about my infrequent contact, but I guess those were different times. My point is that you should let your kid go and focus on what’s going to be best for them.
My kid is not really that far away, only five hours. We have already discovered that indeed winter weather can make a mess of the best laid plans, but we have also discovered that kids are quite resourceful about figuring out how to get where they need to go. Greyhound has entered our consciousness for the first time in thirty-plus years. Kids club together for Uber, kids offer rides to the first taker, they consder train routes, you name it. I am totally in favor of letting kids go.