<p>Boston is a two hour drive from Northampton or about a 2.5 hour bus ride and you can walk to the bus station. I think the issue is how much work you have on the weekends - my D found it hard to come home to the Boston area much more than a few extra weekends when there were no holidays due to workload.</p>
<p>For international travel, you’ll probably want to go to Boston/Logan or NYC/JFK, the latter being another 30-60 minutes longer to get to than Boston, depending on traffic. </p>
<p>As for weekend trips, D managed about one or two a semester. She was a glutton for workload, so she may not be a typical example. Getting to U/Mass or Amherst on the weekend should be no problem.</p>
<p>I doubt you’ll be going to Boston more than once or twice a semester, though if you really want to make that your priority, you can fairly easily. The bus leaves from right in downtown Northampton and it’s not a very long ride. It’s just that based on my experience, if we went to Boston twice in a school year, that was a feat. There’s always a lot to do on the weekends, and the Boston bus schedule is just not that conducive to college students. Though there is a new shuttle service company that just started up that goes to Boston and maybe also New York that has a pretty good schedule. </p>
<p>The closest airport is the Hartford/Bradley airport. You have to pay to take a shuttle there though, there’s no public transport and no bus (well you can take a bus apparently, but it’s a little complicated) and the shuttle services are all equally pricy (between $40-50 each way). Smith runs it’s own bus to the airport before major breaks that’s only $15, but there’s no pick up service after the break ends. Though usually there are enterprising Smithies who will be willing to drop you off/pick you up for a small fee or some candy or something. The same is true of travelling to Boston or New York, a lot of people who have cars or go home on weekends will give rides to people going that way.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ah . . . for the simple life of a college student! :)</p>
<p>Haha thank you for the replies 
Ok, this isn’t really relevant to this thread…but how far away is Hartford from Smith?</p>
<p>Hartford airport to Smith is about 50 minutes by shuttle, 35 minutes if I’m driving and the local mobile constabulary isn’t in evidence.</p>
<p>I believe there is a cheap bust to NYC - my D was excited to hear about this on a tour of one of the 5 colleges and talked about going down to museums. The reality ( and she is a self pressured studier) was that she was very proud of making it to the Noho movie theater and a concert this semester.</p>
<p>There’s a bus to NYC, it’s not all that cheap as I recall, but it’s not expensive and you can get a student discount if you buy at the station. </p>
<p>There’s a new service called 88 express that is running shuttles to NYC, but my understanding is that htis isn’t really a bus, as much as some enterprising people with vans.</p>
<p>Do a lot of people choose to go to Boston/NYC on the weekends?</p>
<p>^ Not really, unless they happen to be from there, or it’s a holiday weekend (a vacation period or Easter or something like that) or they’re going for some specific reason like to attend a conference or performance. Going to Boston/NYC is more like a “special” outing rather than a regular occurence. </p>
<p>Seriously, you just have so much to do on the weekends, there isn’t time to regularly go on jaunts. You’ll be spending most of your weekends in the library/lab/art studio/studying in a coffee shop during the day and most of your weekend nights doing something recreational (or doing more studying, depending on the weekend). Occasionally you can carve out time for something more adventurous, but even then you’re more likely to keep your adventures in the Pioneer Valley area.</p>
<p>In general, I find that high school students deciding on colleges underestimate the attachments they will form to the campus and the surrounding area. They are afraid they will feel bored or have nothing to do. The fact is that residential colleges have so many ongoing activities that it’s usually difficult to choose. Plus, you’ll have friends down the hall to hang out with, and, yes, studying to do. Students may transfer out of Smith for various reasons, but I’ll bet being bored isn’t one of them.</p>
<p>I think my daughter has gone to Boston four times in four years – and only one of those times was for the heck of it. She’s been to NYC twice with friends who live there for long weekends. Earlier this semester, she spent several Fridays and weekends away for graduate school interviews, and the time away nearly killed her. My daughter found that Northampton and environs offered a lot to do without eating up whole days of her time.</p>
<p>Kiterunner, my first-year daughter has a very close friend who attends Barnard. One weekend in the fall her friend came to visit Smith and this semester my daughter took a weekend trip down to NYC to visit her. But all of this was very carefully timed to work around papers, tests, mid-terms, presentations, research, EC activities, etc. for each of them. Otherwise, she’s been, as CrewDad is fond to say, in the Happy Valley. I certainly don’t know the particulars of my daughter’s day-to-day activities (that’s what college is all about, right?) but it sounds like her friends also spend their weekend time in the Happy Valley as well. I don’t think you have to worry about Smith being a suitcase school.</p>