Dave Matthews Band and Ithaca

The day began going up to Cornell University, my sweet Melissa's Law School alma mater. Upstate New York is vastly different from what most people think about when they think of New York. Upstate's very green and hilly, with towns and villages (that's what it said on their speed limit signs-village!), interspersed pretty randomly, connected with super, skinny roads that makes it even more dangerous at night, when it's raining. Thank goodness we had a Garmin GPS that revealed the twisty roads to us because we didn't bring any local maps.

The main campus is built on rolling ground overlooking Cayuga Lake.

This was my first time to visit an Ivy League school and the first department we checked out was the Law School. Cornell's not that huge so all the structures reflect the lower student volume. Very stately Law Library and the classrooms were either small or slightly larger than small. Not the 200+ seating we had in my upper division Biology classes at the University of Texas at Austin.

Excellent academia vibe within the class and all the technology accompanying it. The classrooms still contained greenboards but the projectors and speakers technology for presentations were everywhere. All the classrooms had stately wooden chairs and desks/table rows with outlets for laptops, all standing on plush, dark slate colored carpet. Very earthy colors construction with windows.

The Law Library looked like a scaled-down version of the great hallway in a Harry Potter film. Cavernous with stained glass lamps and windows letting in copious amounts of natural light. The thick, oak doors had dark leather padding on both sides with its perimeters studded in brass tacks.

Here's the hanging judge in the mock trial courtroom...



Walked around the Commons in downtown Ithaca and ate at the Moosewood Restaurant (in fact, we have two cookbooks from this restaurant). This is a vegetarian restaurant sweet Melissa used to frequent as she worked for her JD some 17 years ago. Washed down my meal with a super hoppy concoction from Ithaca Beer Company named CascaZilla.


In the evening we drove 2 hours, one-way out to Bethel, NY to watch the Dave Matthews Band perform along with their Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King band mates (Tim Reynolds-Guitar, Rashawn Ross-Trumpet, and Jeff Coffin-saxes and pennywhistle). Needless to say it was an amazing show. Dave covered a song from another one of my favorite singer/songwriters Daniel Lanois, entitled The Maker. If you've never seen DMB you're missing a super special, audio-visual, talented, jamming treat. We got back home by 2 am driving at night in upstate NY crazy roads. Thank goodness for our Garmin. It was a great conclusion to a great day, hanging out with my sweetie and listening to one of our most favorite bands perform live on vacation nonetheless.