At last, here's the photoblog from our trip last Sunday, when we decided to celebrate my car's 10,000th mile in style by driving upstate to see a couple wineries and charming villages and mostly leaves. I usually delete the links from the pictures I post, but I'm leaving them in this time so you can click on each to see it at a larger size.
We started out by crossing the GW into Jersey and getting onto the Palisades Parkway, which had some scenic overlooks. Naturally we stopped at the first one:
Here's the view looking back out at the parkway. There follow some views of NYC from our vantage point.
At this point the clouds are starting to get nastier. They were moving pretty fast!
But it was only one view - when we looked out towards the GW, nothin' but blue skies...
A bit northwest is the area of the Bronx where we were pretty sure our house is:
We turned from the Palisades onto Route 9W, and the trees started getting more and more colorful:
The route's a little deceptive, you don't realize you're climbing until you're right up there atop some very lovely hills. And, like a mountain or something. (I think we were skirting Bear Mountain.)
The sky kept looking ominous:
At this elevation we were in the midst of a low level of clouds, which draped and misted over the hills like dry ice:
It was then Robin noticed the camera's battery signalling it was low (why it couldn't have told me that before we left the house I'll never know) so I decided to conserve it and just enjoy the rest of the trip up. It took almost three hours to get to our nominal destination of New Paltz (this trip was far more about the journey than any pit stops), and of course we can't go to new places without trying their sushi!
Highly recommended. Some really creative rolls! We then walked around the main route a bit, a really typical (almost stereotypical) New England'y college town with lots of restaurants and shops to peer in and a kind of hippie-holdover vibe which I liked a lot. Then back on the road to see if we could follow the Shawangunk Wine Trail a bit.
I liked the name Rivendell so we went there first. That's kind of its logo there. Pretty surroundings. But inside it wasn't All That. I don't know what we expected, but it must have been more than a small shack that combined a tasting room and souvenir shop and what I guess was a dining room. Maybe if we'd gone in with an official tour group...
Then it got dark and started to rain so we followed the trail to the next winery, also not terribly impressive, and the road was out so we couldn't follow the trail any more and we decided we'd had our fun and we'd cheat by taking the Thruway home instead of crossing the Mid-Hudson Bridge into 9A (don't know why it's not 9E if the western equivalent is 9W, maybe it's "A" because it was the first and still one of the longest streets in the world; it's the one that starts at the tip of Battery Park in Manhattan). The foliage on the Thruway was lovely as well; the accident that delayed our return for an hour was not.
We started out by crossing the GW into Jersey and getting onto the Palisades Parkway, which had some scenic overlooks. Naturally we stopped at the first one:
Here's the view looking back out at the parkway. There follow some views of NYC from our vantage point.
At this point the clouds are starting to get nastier. They were moving pretty fast!
But it was only one view - when we looked out towards the GW, nothin' but blue skies...
A bit northwest is the area of the Bronx where we were pretty sure our house is:
We turned from the Palisades onto Route 9W, and the trees started getting more and more colorful:
The route's a little deceptive, you don't realize you're climbing until you're right up there atop some very lovely hills. And, like a mountain or something. (I think we were skirting Bear Mountain.)
The sky kept looking ominous:
At this elevation we were in the midst of a low level of clouds, which draped and misted over the hills like dry ice:
It was then Robin noticed the camera's battery signalling it was low (why it couldn't have told me that before we left the house I'll never know) so I decided to conserve it and just enjoy the rest of the trip up. It took almost three hours to get to our nominal destination of New Paltz (this trip was far more about the journey than any pit stops), and of course we can't go to new places without trying their sushi!
Highly recommended. Some really creative rolls! We then walked around the main route a bit, a really typical (almost stereotypical) New England'y college town with lots of restaurants and shops to peer in and a kind of hippie-holdover vibe which I liked a lot. Then back on the road to see if we could follow the Shawangunk Wine Trail a bit.
I liked the name Rivendell so we went there first. That's kind of its logo there. Pretty surroundings. But inside it wasn't All That. I don't know what we expected, but it must have been more than a small shack that combined a tasting room and souvenir shop and what I guess was a dining room. Maybe if we'd gone in with an official tour group...
Then it got dark and started to rain so we followed the trail to the next winery, also not terribly impressive, and the road was out so we couldn't follow the trail any more and we decided we'd had our fun and we'd cheat by taking the Thruway home instead of crossing the Mid-Hudson Bridge into 9A (don't know why it's not 9E if the western equivalent is 9W, maybe it's "A" because it was the first and still one of the longest streets in the world; it's the one that starts at the tip of Battery Park in Manhattan). The foliage on the Thruway was lovely as well; the accident that delayed our return for an hour was not.
0 comments:
Post a Comment