When my cousins and I were little, our grandpa or one of our parents would shuttle us over to Great Gun, the beach at the end of Fire Island, N.Y., or to the very tip of Westhampton Beach on the other side of the Moriches Inlet. We would drop anchor in a cove on the bay side of the dunes and either stay there and wade in the water or climb the white sand dunes to the ocean side and play wiffle ball. For me, these trips always ended in third degree burns. One time I ripped the bottom of my foot open on a rusty boardwalk nail. I have nothing but good memories from these trips.
Tag Archives: Day Trips
When Day Trips Fail: Upstate New York Edition
View of the Hudson River from Olana.
I want to preface this entire post by saying that I grew up north of New York City, in what people would technically refer to as “upstate,” and I believe that it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. That said, I’ve spent very little time in the equally beautiful, but much less population-dense, up-upstate New York…until last weekend.
The trouble started when I read Tom Lewis’ book The Hudson. It was lent to me about two years ago, by my friend Todd, when I first moved to New York City, and I didn’t pick it up until the beginning of this month, when I had finished everything I could possibly read about the history of the British royal family. The Hudson is a beautifully written, yet short, history of the Hudson River, starting from lower Manhattan and New Jersey, all the way up to its origin at Lake Tear of the Clouds. Toward the end of the book, Lewis discusses Frederic Edwin Church’s mystical mansion, called Olana, which still stands overlooking 60 miles of the Hudson River in Hudson, N.Y. I had to go to there.
Filed under Field Trips
It’s a Hard Knock Life
In the past year since I moved to New York City, my life seemed to settle down quite a bit. You’ve probably noticed this because of the slow down on the blog. Don’t get me wrong, New York City is filled with crazy, and every day you take your life into your hands just by walking outside. Literally, going into the subway these days might as well be suicide. But, in the past year, I’ve moved into a great apartment on my own, landed a new job, started volunteering at a cancer hospital…I’m basically awesome and perfect at being a New Yorker. There has been little of the crazy that was following me all over Boston, like when I took my friends out to dinner and we ended up starring in a reality show, or that time the limo with the fully stocked wet bar picked me up on Comm Ave. There was one night at Sparks Steakhouse that was pretty interesting…but I digress.
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