Past Halfway

If you come off of Route 1 into Princeton up Washington Road, then the first light you come to is at Faculty Road.

If you turn right at that light, then you have about a quarter-mile drive to the entrance of the Jadwin Gym parking lot. TigerBlog has driven thousands of miles on that quarter-mile stretch.

Think about it. If it's a quarter-mile, and TB has been driving into that parking lot for nearly 30 years, then, yeah, that number is pretty high.

Whatever that number is, it's stayed frozen this summer, since there is construction currently being done on that piece of Faculty Road.

Now you'd think that closing off a quarter-mile piece of a road couldn't possibly make that big of a difference, but then you'd be wrong. If you're trying to get to Alexander Road to go to either the Princeton Pike or Route 1, you now have to take the very long way around.

You have to go to the far end of the parking lot, for starters. It's taken TigerBlog about three weeks to not instinctively go to the closed off end.

Then you have to either go to Harrison Street to get to Route 1, which takes awhile. Or you can go up to Nassau Street and then fight your way down to 206 or the Princeton Pike.

Or you can turn left out of the parking lot and then left on Ivy Lane, back to Washington Road. Then it's a left on Washington down to Faculty (or cutting through back by the lacrosse, field hockey and soccer fields, although Elm Drive was closed for awhile too).

TigerBlog was in the parking lot the other day heading out when he was flagged down by a woman and her son, who had just taken a campus tour. TB had no idea who they were, though he did find out they're from Ohio.

She thought at first she had been parked in Lot 21, the Jadwin lot, but it turned out that they were actually parked on the other side of campus.

The woman told TB that she had parked in one of three lots, none of which, TB thinks, is the actual number of a lot at Princeton, though they were pretty close to matching up with 20, 23 and 17, which are on the other side of the campus.

TigerBlog tried to give her directions to get to where her car was. He's terrible at that. He's awful at giving directions in general, since he doesn't pay all that close attention to the names of the roads he's been on so many times.

Fortunately Waze has eliminated most of those issues.

TB has walked from Jadwin to where their car was about a thousand times. He has spent a lot of time on this campus obviously, so you'd think he'd be better at directing people around it.

Instead, all he could really do was point to Jadwin and Princeton Stadium and say to walk in between them, take the road around, find the bridge and just sort of keeping going in that direction. Anyway, they were very nice, and TB hopes they enjoyed their time on campus.

The construction on Faculty Road will be done in another month, in time for the start of the new academic year and the 2018-19 athletic calendar.

Each summer, TigerBlog likes to calculate the midway point between the end of one athletic year and the start of the next. Hey, what could be more fun than that?

Anyway, the last game of the 2017-18 year was May 13, when the women's lacrosse team lost to eventual runner-up Boston College in the second round of the NCAA tournament. The last event was the NCAA track and field championships, which ended for Princeton on June 9.

The first game, and event, of 2018-19 will be August 24, when the women's soccer team plays at New Hampshire.

The halfway point, then, has already come and gone. If you go by the last game, then the halfway mark was the Fourth of July. If you go by the event, then halfway was July 17.

Today is July 23. That means the women's soccer game is a month from tomorrow.

How is that possible?

There will be seven Princeton Athletic events in August featuring four teams: both soccers, field hockey and women's volleyball.

And that's only a month away? How'd that happen?