<p>JIB1985, I went on orbitz.com and checked roundtrip airfare from Boston, New York and Baltimore to Walla Walla for the dates of Whitman’s Thanksgiving holiday this year. They are $594, $648 and $626 respectively. Do that three times a year and it’s more like $2000 when you’ve added taxes and checking in bags. Gee, how did that end up sounding like a bargain? Keep in mind that there are a lot of kids who drive to campus from Seattle and Portland, so after a while she’ll be able to wrangle rides with them. That will knock off the expensive hop from Seattle to Walla Walla as well as the wait in the Seattle airport to change planes. There are also buses from school that deliver kids to Seattle and Portland airports for the holiday breaks, but we found the times were odd so have never used them.</p>
<p>5boys, your son sounds great, I’m sure his passions will carry the day. PM me any time. </p>
<p>rayrick, you’ve never sounded anything but completely reasonable. Princeton Review is measuring something, so is Fiske and US News. Do their methods make sense? I don’t know? What about all these descriptions that fly around? What exactly do quirky, laid-back and unpretentious mean? You and I both used the word laid-back, but meant different things.</p>
<p>There was a big flap on campus last spring when Whitman announced that they were adding the phrase “Unpretentious Northwest Culture” to their promotional literature. Why? Because the students thought it was extremely pretentious.</p>
<p>Someone here in the DC area told me she flew via Denver to Pasco, an hour or so from Walla Walla, and took a bus from there. She thought that was the most direct route. But with lots of kids driving to and from Seattle and Portland, that may be the easier route as a student.</p>
<p>My son has flown from San Francisco directly to Pasco and then rode the bus to Walla Walla, pretty easy and cheaper from here. When I was playing on Orbitz and tried to find flights from the east coast to Pasco, the flights that came up were actually more expensive than flying all the way to Walla Walla from there. I didn’t try DC though, so your source may well have the best information.</p>
<p>“There was a big flap on campus last spring when Whitman announced that they were adding the phrase “Unpretentious Northwest Culture” to their promotional literature. Why? Because the students thought it was extremely pretentious.”</p>
<p>This amuses me :)</p>
<p>My daughter just got a shiny new viewbook from Whitman in the mail yesterday (they’d already sent one, but this one is new and improved?), and I can verify that the words ‘unpretentious’ and ‘Northwest’ both made it into the cover letter, though I don’t think they were in the exact sequence above :)</p>
<p>I have to say that Whitties thinking the phrase unpretentious is pretentious would get the admiration of my S… he would totally agree…LOL!! I will be waiting anxiously for the new viewbook to hit our mailbox soon… why are viewbooks so exciting to me??? I guess because it brings back so many memories of college for me and what a great time I had.</p>
<p>uh-oh JIB1958, I forgot spring break, that adds a 4th round trip. I did the orbitz search again and found roundtrip flights from DC National airport through Denver to Pasco on United Airlines for $767 (including tax and fees). The bus to Walla Walla then takes an hour, costs under $10 and takes the students to within a few blocks of campus. So it’ll be more like $3100 for transportation initially. There is a campus ride list-serve so people can find rides to Portland and Seattle, also informal arrangements with friends are common as I mentioned before. Whitman gives the students longer breaks, a week for Thanksgiving and two weeks for spring break, I imagine this is because it takes a full day to get there or home. The campus stays open over Thanksgiving in case students don’t want to make the big trip home so close the the winter break, I know the international students stay around, as do others.</p>
<p>Pea, do you live in Portland or Seattle? Just wondering what your daughter’s experience has been getting to and from campus. </p>
<p>5boys, you hit the nail on the head, all those college visits made me want to go back!</p>
<p>@bopamdo – I live in Seattle. My daughter has a car so she drives to and from school, it’s about five hours, (and incredibly boring). She gives rides to people and she said it would be easy for her to get rides if she didn’t have a car. The drive to and from Portland is much nicer because it goes along the Columbia Gorge and I want to say that it is also about five hours, but I’m not sure about that.</p>
<p>My D graduated from Whitman last year. We live in the SF Bay Area. She came home every Thanksgiving, winter holiday, and spring break, and even one of the four-day mid-semester breaks if I remember correctly. We tried all the transportation options: </p>
<ul>
<li>flying to and from Walla Walla (sometimes the price goes down) </li>
<li>taking the school shuttle bus to the Portland airport ([Whitman</a> Express Buses](<a href=“http://www.whitman.edu/content/reid/services/buses]Whitman”>http://www.whitman.edu/content/reid/services/buses). It also goes to Seattle.). She did this freshman year a few times, then switched to:</li>
<li>flying to/from Portland and catching a ride with friends. Usually this involved driving to the friend’s house, spending the night, then getting a ride to the airport in the morning. Repeat in reverse to get back to campus. Depending on where the friends live, this could be done in Seattle too. There are LOTS of Portland and Seattle kids at Whitman.</li>
<li>flying to/from Pasco and either getting a ride from a friend or taking the Grape Line bus ([Grape</a> Line - Walla Walla to Pasco, WA - Schedule & Fares](<a href=“http://www.grapeline.us/schedule.htm]Grape”>http://www.grapeline.us/schedule.htm))</li>
<li>driving to/from Boise with a friend who lived nearby and flying from there.</li>
<li>driving all the way home. This happened at the end of the year with a friend who was driving his car back home to Arizona, and once when the snow was so bad that the airport and most roads were closed.</li>
</ul>
<p>My D did not have a car, but lots of her friends did. She had a friend or two from the East coast who used the same methods to get to either Portland or Seattle airport. I figure that Whitman must be one of the most remote campuses in the US, but once the kids get settled and make friends the transportation options become more numerous. It really does work out fine.</p>
<p>Bopambo, No uh-ohs necessary. You’re very kind to do the research. I imagine there would be school breaks when our daughter would want to run off and do something exciting with her west-coast friends, but there could also be a time or two when we’d want to fly out to visit her. $3,100 is probably a good ballpark figure, though it could rise some during the four years.</p>
<p>Rayrick, my D loved Whitman. She was a psych major and music minor, very involved in the music department during her whole career there. She had good professors, all kinds of interesting classes (and a few duds, of course), always found plenty to do, made wonderful friends, and generally had just the undergraduate experience that I hoped she would. She came away with an interest in neuropsych, and has a job in a cognitive/social psych lab for two to three years until she feels ready for grad school. She is very well prepared for whatever she decides to do next.</p>
<p>Yep, the quake and the aftershocks. Not as intense as one we felt in Japan some years ago, but stronger than anything we expected to feel around here. Shifted a few paintings around, and knocked a mask off its hook on the wall.</p>
<p>^^^^Glad there was no real damage done. It was big news here. We experienced the '89 Loma Prieta quake while living in San Francisco, we’ll be telling our grandkids about that one. It’s just not something you expect in DC.</p>