Betsy Ladyzhets loves a good commute.

Columbia has a couple of different campuses. The main one is, of course, Morningside, those few blocks between Broadway and Amsterdam that we all know and cry in. And then there’s Manhattanville, manspreading over Harlem, and the Medical Center chilling uptown. But did you know that Columbia also runs a whole research campus in the Palisades, right across the Hudson River?

This campus is called the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and it’s incredible. Imagine an oasis of nature and science, completely removed from the packed, stressful atmosphere of Columbia’s main campus, yet still close enough that you can get back to your dorm with a short bus ride. It’s like the Central Park to Columbia’s Broadway. And you can get to Lamont for free: appropriately color-coded green shuttle buses run almost every hour to and from Morningside Heights, stopping in front of Teacher’s College on 120th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam.

Although Lamont is primarily a science campus hosting lab spaces for many ecology and earth sciences professors, you don’t need to be doing research there to go check it out—anyone with a CUID can get onto the shuttle. You could go to commune with nature, to hike on one of the trails which start at the edge of the campus, or to try a sandwich from their cafeteria. (Lamont’s cafeteria is weirdly hard to find, tucked down the main pathway of the campus and up a flight of stairs, but it is cheap and has better sandwiches than any Morningside dining location.)

Or you could go to Lamont simply to procrastinate on your work with a nice, long bus ride. The views of the NYC skyline over the George Washington Bridge are priceless.