Arrival at UMass

So I’m back again – only two days later, we’ll see how long the regular updates last! I have a bit of time to kill before evaluation starts so I thought I’d bring the blog up to date. The flights were relatively uneventful, though there is more turbulence across the US than we usually have in Australia.

I had an exit row from LA to Chicago but the leg room wasn’t too bad on the shorter leg from Chicago to Hartford. There’s no food on these shorter AA flights, so I took advantage of the Admirals Club at Chicago too so I could grab a bite to eat. I arrived in Hartford pretty much on schedule. My luggage didn’t take long and then I headed off to Hertz, exchanging a few messages with the people I was bring to campus with me.

There was a long wait and Hertz, but we eventually got it sorted out. We go to choose the car from a few options, but in the end we had to go with the van, because it didn’t look like we would fit all our luggage in anything smaller. If I remember I’ll take a photo of it to put in a later post.

The drive to campus was relatively uneventful. Ir remembered that the right was the right side of the road! There were quite a few cars around and it’s really pretty easy to remember what you’re supposed to do when you’re following others. We arrived about a bit later but grabbed a golf cart and headed over to the welcome dinner, where I caught up with some familiar faces from last year. We didn’t stay too late as I was pretty tired and others were ready to leave too.

When I got back to my room I ummhed and aahed between going to Walmart and going to bed. I decided to head to Walmart even though I was tired, so I could get some supplies. Came back, made my bed and had a good sleep. This post is long so I’ll end it there, but there’s a photo of my dorm room below. It’s very standard American, a single room when you often see doubles in TV shows but it does the job.