Princeton

Lia and I drove into Princeton not expecting much beyond a quick look at a famous campus, and left having spent the whole day there. Nassau Street runs the length of downtown like a spine, lined with ivy-covered brick and a scatter of bookshops and cafés, and it opens directly onto the university’s Gothic stone gates. We passed under FitzRandolph Gate — tradition holds that students only walk back through it once, at graduation — and found ourselves inside a campus that looks less like New Jersey and more like Oxford transplanted onto the Eastern Seaboard.

The university and Einstein’s town

We wandered Princeton University’s campus for hours: the soaring Gothic chapel, the ivy-thick courtyards of Blair Arch, and Nassau Hall, whose stone walls still bear a Revolutionary War cannonball scar from the Battle of Princeton. This was also Albert Einstein’s adopted hometown for two decades, and we tracked down his modest clapboard house on Mercer Street, unmarked and still privately owned, before detouring to the Institute for Advanced Study grounds nearby, where he worked until his death — a quiet campus of its own, ringed by woods and a pond he was known to walk beside while thinking.

Princeton Battlefield and Morven

A short walk from campus, Princeton Battlefield State Park preserves the open fields where George Washington’s forces routed the British in January 1777, a turning-point victory in the Revolution’s darkest winter. We walked the quiet meadow, past the Clarke House farmhouse used as a field hospital, trying to picture the chaos and gunsmoke that once filled this now-peaceful stretch of grass. Back in town, Morven, once home to a signer of the Declaration of Independence and later New Jersey’s governor’s residence, gave us a formal garden and a house museum’s worth of the state’s early political history.

Palmer Square and Carnegie Lake

We ended the day the way most Princeton visits should: coffee and a pastry on Palmer Square, a tidy colonial-revival shopping green built in the 1930s, before walking down to Carnegie Lake, a long, narrow reservoir donated by Andrew Carnegie on the condition the university start a rowing program. We watched the crew teams sculling long, precise strokes across still evening water, the Princeton boathouse glowing behind them, and understood why so many alumni describe this town as impossible to fully leave behind.

Getting There

Princeton sits about an hour from both New York City and Philadelphia by car or NJ Transit train, making it an easy day trip from either. Newark Liberty International Airport is the closest major gateway, roughly forty-five minutes north, and the “Dinky,” a short branch train, connects Princeton’s own tiny station directly to the Northeast Corridor line at Princeton Junction for onward travel.