<p>I am leaving from SF to east coast to visit several ivies including Brown, Cornell, Columbia, UPenn.. I wold like to know which airport I should choose and is it feasible to just stay at one hotel and drive around these campuses? Thanks, I never been in east coast. Any suggestion/tips are greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>Wow, not unless you're a slave to driving. It's 200+ miles from Columbia to Cornell alone. Brown to NYC would be about three hours of driving and NYC to Philly would be about two hours.</p>
<p>In terms of major airports and where you might get the best deals flying into one and out of the other, you could fly into Philly, rent a car, and then drive from Penn to Columbia to Cornell and end up at Brown. From there, you could fly out of TF Green in Providence or go up to Boston (about an hour's drive) and fly out of Logan. To save on driving, you could do Brown before Cornell but I don't know what airport would be best up there.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Any more comment/advise are grealy appreciated.</p>
<p>We are doing something similar but to the west coast using frequent flyer miles. We need to go in and out of the same airport and are using LAx (we know, we know). Planned on driving to the Bay Area for Santa Clara , then down to U San Diego, out to the Claremonts and U Redlands, then back to Pepperdine and fly out of LAX. Someone suggested a shuttle flight from San Jose to San Diego which was reasonable so we are eliminating a long leg of driving. (The 2 one way rent a car is about the same cost as 1 for the whole time).
You could do some thing similar, find the cheapest shuttle between far cities of your tour, fly into one, drive to other close schools, shuttle to the other end, tour near there then drive(or shuttle) to the original airpoort to come home.</p>
<p>fly into Newark and stay in that area to do NYC and Philadelphia with one overnight. Not buckets of fun, but doable. If you don't get a car, you could take NJ transit from Newark to both Philadelphia and Manhattan. Cornell and Brown are too far away for that, though. Do either of those schools offer assistance in paying for trips or could you afford to fly from Newark to, say, Brown? Cornell gets a bit dicey.</p>
<p>Oh, about hotels, the distance is too great for the same hotel for each school. I would suggest going to a hotel near to your next morning stop the night before. No need to add the stress of rush hour in unfamiliar cities to the already stressful week. Driving to the next city without a deadline is more relaxed.</p>
<p>fly to rochester or buffalo ny...rent a car drive to cornell
spend 11/2 days there..drive east thru albany to dartmouth (beautifrul but
im biased)..continue drive to boston if want to see harvard..
if you hate driving in big cities you could now dump the car and amtrak
to providence for brown..continue amtrak to new haven for yale ..
continue amtrak to manhatten for columbia and then continue anmtrak to
priinceton in nj..and end by amtrak in philly for u of p and fly home from there....whew...of course you can drive the whole route to</p>
<p>what we found is that you sometimes need more than 1 day to appreciate
a school...any questions feel free to email isacc
dad of dart 08</p>
<p>Actually, you could take Amtrak from NYC to Providence. There is also Amtrak to Ithaca, but I believe it involves at least one change of trains.</p>
<p>mominva--
I would suggest that you stop at Pepperdine on your way up the coast to Santa Clara. Then you don't have to backtrack when you go there from the Claremonts since the route to LAX from the Inland Empire would take you south of I-10. Also, take advantage of the carpool lanes. They saved our sanity when we drove to and from LAX to the Claremonts for Family Weekend. (Never again--we'll fly to Ontario Airport next time.)</p>
<p>Have fun!</p>
<p>A comment on driving times: The I95 corridor can get very congested. So the 3 hours from Brown to NYC and 2 hours from NYC to Philly is under ideal conditions (probably 2 a.m.). And even under good conditions, those are very fast times. Amtrak is advisable if you are on a tight schedule (I got caught in a traffic jam last summer and it took five hours to get from NY to Philly).</p>
<p>Cornell is the toughest, because it's off the track. Princeton and UPenn are close to each other; Columbia and Yale are close; Brown and Harvard are close. </p>
<p>Perhaps you should consider visiting schools other than Ivies (whose acceptance rates are dismal). And make some decisions based on other preferences, like size and surroundings (urban vs. rural).</p>
<p>Isaac,
I don't know if Amtrak is the way to go on all those legs if it is more than 2 persons. Their fares rival shuttle flight fares, IMO. They are often working on the tracks in the spring, causing delays. My son's 6 hour ride home for spring break from NC to DC took 11 1/2 last week! And one car rental fee will accomodate the whole family and be available on your schedule!.</p>
<p>Little Mother,
Thanks for the tip on the carpool lanes! Glad to know to look for them. Your suggestion about Pepperdine first would make sense any time but our trip dates. We needed a Saturday stay so we fly in on Holy Saturday, we'll drive and spend Easter Sunday in SF, cause the only school with info sessions on Easter Monday is SCU. Tuesday fly to SD for USD, then we head to Redlands area Tues. evening for Wed visits to Claremonts and Redlands, will spend the evening there too and take a Muddite friend out to dinner. We have afternoon session at Pepperdine Thursday and fly home from Lax on Friday.</p>
<p>But should you decide to do some amtrak, I would suggest going to <a href="http://www.campusvisit.com%5B/url%5D">www.campusvisit.com</a> Because they have an amtrak deal that when you purchase a ticket for your student, a parent travels free.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.campusvisit.com%5B/url%5D">http://www.campusvisit.com</a></p>