I commute because it's fun and I can use the exercise. Riding in rush hour or after dark on our narrow roads is just no fun, so I pretty much ride only during daylight saving time when I can go in late. This term, I had a 9am class, and so haven't commuted much this spring. The last day of class was May 1, but then we had a solid week of rain, so it works out that Bike to Work Week is the first time this season that I've biked to work most days (if I bike Friday, as planned, it will be 4/5).

The round trip is normally 14 miles, but Tuesday's mileage is 15.6 since I made a stop at the IAS to attend a seminar.

I suppose it's nice to save money on gas, but that's not the reason I bike to work. In fact, it's not clear that biking saves money. Right now, gas is about $2/gallon, so I save about $1 on gas each day I bike to work. But I also use an extra 700 or so calories. Try and think what food you can eat for $1 that gives you 700 calories. Not very appetizing!

	Starting out, the view looking down the driveway.		From the end of the driveway, Elm Ridge Road towards Princeton. Notice the "wide" shoulders. And the speed limit is 50 mph. Every other Tuesday is recycling for us. Cans and bottles in the yellow bucket and paper in the green one.
	Elm Ridge Road towards Pennington. On our side of the street, there are mostly just houses (residential zoning). On the other side of the street there are some residential lots, but also some farmland zoned lots and preserved open space. The mailboxes in the distance are at the entrance to "Overlooked Farm." a horse farm.		Our house from across the street.
	Roughly a mile down Elm Ridge Road is this dip where the Honey Brook flows from left to right. About a quarter mile to the right it joins the Stony Brook.		After 1.8 miles, I get to the east end of Elm Ridge Road, where I turn right on Carter Road and almost immediately leave Hopewell Township and enter Lawrence Township.
	Here's the bridge over the Stony Brook on Carter Road. Farther up the road on the left is an entrance to Educational Testing Service which is served by the Princeton Post Office but is actually located in Lawrence Township. Just past where the road disappears in the trees is a traffic light where I'll turn left onto Rosedale Road.		The Stony Brook from the bridge on Carter Road. We've had a lot of rain lately, so it's relatively full.
	I see these fairly often. On Rosedale road proper, there were still pieces of headlights, so this must have happened fairly recently (also, I didn't notice it the day before).		The Rosedale Road entrance to ETS.
	This is an attractive house today, but many years ago it was quite run down, and my kids thought it looked like a typical haunted house from movies or TV shows; ever since, we've thought of it as the haunted house.		I'm about to cross Province Line Road and then I'll be in Princeton Township. Rumor has it that this intersection will get a traffic light soon.
	The sign on the left says that the American Boy Choir School is down the road to the right. You might have seen the choir on TV at holiday time.		I have to cross the Stony Brook again! The hill on the other side, is probably the biggest "climb" on the way in.
	On of the more impressive mansions near the east end of Rosedale Road (shot on the way home).		Shot Wednesday morning, this is another mansion along Rosedale Road. This one sticks in my mind because the lady of the house, in a SUV, right-hooked me when I was on my way home one evening. I turned around, rang her doorbell and told her what she had done. Of course, she said "I didn't see you." But I was watching her in my mirror and was pleased to see her move left to give me more room only to be shocked as she turned right in front of me. So I know she saw me!
	At the traffic light ahead, Rosedale Road becomes Cleveland Lane (NJ roads change names frequently, sometimes in the middle of a block!). I'm going to turn right onto Elm Road here. On the way home, I use Cleveland Lane for one block in order to go straight onto Rosedale and not have to make a left at this intersection. Towards the end of Cleveland Land is Grover Cleveland's house. (But I don't get that far down, so there's no picture!)		Usually, I turn left onto Hodge Road here, but today, I'm headed to the Institute for Advanced Study, so I'm going straight. The next few pictures were shot Wednesday morning to show what I see on my regular commute.
	This is Woodrow Wilson's house on Hodge Road just before it intersects Bayard Lane (Route 206). A little farther and I will be in "downtown Princeton."		In the morning, I go through Palmer Square. Here's the Nassau Inn which is the only hotel in Princeton. (There are many more along Route 1 just out of town.)
	I leave Palmer Square and cross Nassau Street to enter the Princeton University Campus. Here's a shot of Nassau Street to the northeast with downtown Princeton on the left and the university on the right behind the trees.		Back to the Tuesday morning ride: here's where Elm Road intersects Stockton Street (Route 206). This is the direction to Princeton.
	Here's the direction I'm headed, towards Lawrenceville. Route 206 is a major road (doesn't look like it does it!). There are lots of 18 wheelers. A few years ago, NJ tried to regulate big trucks off these smaller roads and onto the big roads like the turnpike (where of course there's a toll!). This was struck down by the courts as interfering with interstate commerce, so we still have 18 wheelers rolling along narrow streets through small towns. I'm headed this direction, but I only have to stay on 206 to the point where that car is just barely in the picture. Since I leave from a light, I can get down to the left turn lane before any big trucks can catch up with me!		I made the left turn onto a street named Lovers Lane!
	Lovers Lane goes by Marquand Park.		The intersection with Mercer Street. About a mile to the left on Mercer Street is Einstein's House. Across the street, Lovers Lane changes to Olden Lane.
	Fuld Hall, the main building of the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein had his office in this building, once it was built. Before that, he had an office in (old) Fine Hall (now Jones Hall) at Princeton University. The IAS and the University are separate institutions, but there is a lot of collaboration between people with common interests. You might have seen Fuld Hall in the movie IQ which was shot in this area. The old fashioned gas station in that movie still exists in Hopewell Boro (one gets there by turning left at Carter Road instead of right). Some of the scenes were shot in Palmer Laboratory (the old physics building, now part of the Frist Campus Center) where graduate students were hired to fill up the blackboards with likely looking equations!		The main entrance to the Institute for Advanced Study is on Einstein Drive.
	The East end of Fuld Hall.		Actually, I'm headed to Bloomberg Hall for the 11 am astrophysics seminar. The natural sciences are now located in Bloomberg Hall.
	The seminar is in the astrophysics library. Here's a picture of the late John Bahcall, a Professor at the Institute for many years. He and the late Lyman Spitzer are considered the fathers of the Hubble Space Telescope, convincing the astronomical community to get behind it and convincing Congress to fund it. As I type this, the first spacewalk of the final maintenance mission is going on. John Grunsfeld has taken along with him the wedding rings of John and his wife Neta. John was also my colleague and mentor, having taught me quantum mechanics in the spring term of 1966 at Caltech when I was a sophomore and helping the tennis team by driving us to away matches. In 1977, he convinced me to write a proposal to participate in the Space Telescope Project. The proposal was selected and I participated until 1999. 22 years from one proposal!		After the seminar, I went to the Bahcall Astrophysics Lunch in the IAS cafeteria and then headed to the lab. Here is the Cleveland Tower of the Graduate College off College Road. In Princeton University jargon, "college" means "living quarters." So this is one of the places where graduate students live. It's off campus, the idea of Princeton's first Dean of the Graduate School, Dean West, who managed to get it off campus over (then president of the university) Woodrow Wilson's objections. If you've seen the movie A Beautiful Mind, this is where John Nash actually lived.
	Still on College Road, here's one of the buildings of the Princeton Theological Seminary which is separate from the university.		At College Road and University Place is the university's McCarter Theater which hosts productions ranging from student written shows to professional Broadway dramas and musicals. Most recently, we saw a production of Twelfth Night here.
	Looking down University Place, that's a train station behind the cars and trees. A one car train (it's not a train if it only has one car, right?) runs between here and the Northeast Corridor mainline at Princeton Junction. Locals refer to the train as the Dinky or the PJ&B for Princeton Junction and Back.		Across University Place is the entrance to the campus proper. Straight ahead is Dillon Gym where Bill Bradley played basketball, but now mainly used by non-varsity athletes, faculty and staff. To the left and right are undergraduate dorms.
	Continuing across campus, I pass the back of Dillon Gym. Yes, the tower is part of the gym. In fact, the Faculty Committee on Athletics (on which I'm serving a three year term) meets over lunch in the top room of the tower.		Opposite the gym is the new Whitman College, Princeton's sixth undergraduate residential college. It's architecture is "Collegiate Gothic" and a large number of masons were kept busy doing the stone work. Princeton's had a serious building boom for about a decade, but it's coming to a halt with the collapse of the economy.
	After making a slight jog on Elm Drive (different than Elm Road) which runs through campus, but is closed to public traffic, I continue across campus on Goheen Walk. Bob Goheen was Princeton's President when I arrived in 1968. Schultz Laboratory is on the left and Lewis Thomas Laboratory is on the right. Both are for molecular biology. Ahead is the math tower.		Goheen Walk ends at Washington Road which is the main connection between downtown Princeton and Route 1, so there's always heavy traffic here. In NJ, traffic is supposed to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks, but it seems the only way to get a vehicle to stop is to dare its driver to run over you! Across the street is the brand new (opened last fall) Frank Gehry designed Lewis Science Library. There are very few straight sections of the building.
	Next to the science library is Fine Hall, the math building. It just needs a little ivory!		The gray building across Washington Road is McDonnell Hall which contains lecture halls, classrooms, and teaching labs. Mostly, undergraduate physics and math classes are taught in McDonnell. Behind McDonnell is the Jadwin-Fine courtyard and even farther behind is the football stadium.
	Here's the Jadwin-Fine courtyard with Jadwin Hall which houses the Physics Department in the background. The Calder sculpture is called Three Orange Disks. The disks were originally painted bright orange. It was so ugly, they were quickly repainted black! Under the courtyard is the math-physics library which has an underground connection to the Lewis Science Library which is behind Fine Hall, which is behind me. McDonnell Hall is not in the picture but forms the right boundary of the courtyard. If you check out the similar picture from my earlier photo-journal, you'll see that the windows along the top are new. The space formerly occupied by graduate student carrels has been converted into the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science.		Finally I'm in the Jadwin Hall Courtyard which has a sculpture in honor of Niels Bohr. The window to the right, held together by duct tape, is my window! When someone asks what happened, I say that a student was misbehaving so badly I had to defenestrate him. Seriously, a number of windows are developing cracks. Mine developed a 3-legged crack and when we had a big windstorm, it blew a triangular piece of glass formed where the cracks intersected into the office! I don't know when the window will be replaced (measurements have been taken at least two times), but the tape is there to keep the window from falling into the office or the courtyard!
	On the way home I ride up Elm Drive to the front of campus. Here's the side of Nassau Hall (not it's best view!). Nassau Hall predates the revolutionary war and is the main administration building. The President, Provost, Dean of the Faculty, and Dean of the Graduate School all have their offices here. It was involved in the revolutionary war Battle of Princeton and it was temporarily the capitol of the US as the Continental Congress met in Nassau Hall from June to November, 1783. (Congress had no money to pay the soldiers and wanted to get out of Philadelphia!)		Here's the front of Alexander Hall which houses Princeton's biggest auditorium, Richardson Auditorium.
	Blair Tower and Arch. This is a dormitory which is part of Rockefeller College (an undergraduate residential college). If you saw A Beautiful Mind, you'll recognize the window above the arch as the window through which John Nash defenestrated his desk. But John was a graduate student and didn't live here, but in the Graduate College (see earlier photo). The tower itself contains classrooms with dormitory rooms in the buildings connecting to it on either side. In fact, I taught a freshman seminar, "Where's Waldo, the Science and Applications of GPS" in a classroom that looks out from the other side of the tower.		This is Holder Hall, another dormitory associated with Rockefeller College. Many of the scenes in A Beautiful Mind were shot in an around Rockefeller College. For example, the "math tea" was shot in the "Rocky" common room. The college staff was quite excited to see Russell Crowe up close! By the way, I'm a faculty fellow of Rockefeller College and for many years had freshmen and sophomores from Rocky as advisees. Through the arch is Holder Courtyard, the starting point for the Nude Olympics. Tradition required that on the evening of the first snowfall of the academic year, undergraduates would gather -- nude -- in Holder Courtyard and from there run around campus. Usually a lot of alcoholic lubrication was required to begin the olympics, so the university, fearful of lawsuits, put a stop to it by promising expulsion to any students caught participating.
	Here, I'm lined up in traffic waiting to cross Bayard Lane onto Hodge Road on my way home. After this, the route home pretty much follows the route in. It's about 5 minutes after 6 and the traffic is still pretty heavy. The drivers just can't seem to get their minds around the idea that the bicycle isn't what's delaying them, it's all those other cars!