I’m camping again, but not really on the road. Ever since we both knew we would be on the east coast, my friend Dylan and I have been planning to meet up. He was able to transcend Reno by getting into Columbia for graduate study in Biology – not quite sure what the program is, but he just told me that the last thing he was doing at UNR was studying nematode gonads (to cure Alzheimer’s! :).
Amazingly, we’ve actually pulled it off! I pretty much refused to come into the city in the van … much as I would love a couple of days of cruising the big-time museums, dealing with the big blue beast in Manhattan would just be too much.
As our fateful weekend loomed, I researched likely places to meet and ended up choosing a place quite close to New York (a mixed blessing as we shall see), just off the Taconic Parkway. I remember the Taconic Parkway from gosh … the 60’s, coming up here in high school with my mom. A beautiful road, but designed for a different era. It was lovely this time of year but by no means relaxing. Insane NY drivers tailgating you and the turn-offs are essentially right-angle turns with not much notice. In typical east coast fashion, there was an itty bitty sign for my park, I managed to not get rear-ended making the turn, then …. nothing … not a clue whether the park was to the left or the right. It was still pretty early in the afternoon, and I did find the campground, found a campsite, and settled in.
First shock: the $15 campground actually cost $26.25! The base price was indeed $15 , + $5 out-of-state fee + $4 weekend fee + $2.75 processing fee … processing fee!?!?!.
Second shock: it was almost full and I didn’t have many choices. Seems obvious in retrospect, but the same features that caused me to select it to meet a friend from the city would make it attractive to just about anybody that wanted to escape the city on a cold but clear peak leaf season weekend … duh.
But I found a pretty sweet spot, that was actually quite private considering what a busy place this became. I went for a nice two hour sunset walk. I was surprised at what a disorganized free-for-all the place was after then extremely organized and bureaucratic check-in procedure … ($2.75 processing fee?!?!). The trails are poorly marked and apt to just disappear, so that I and many others ended up having to walk along the busy, narrow-shoulder state highway just to get anywhere.
This week has been quite stormy and cold, early winter-ish, and tonight continues the trend, windy and in the low 30’s. Dylan and his sweetie Natalie roll in about 11pm (!) – they actually found the place without calling – I was amazed!
Saturday
The nearest town is Cold Spring, which is right on the Hudson, almost right across the river from West Point, extremely quaint and picturesque … and full of city folk on a peak fall weekend. So the whole picture becomes clear. This is why the campground is so danged popular: people come up here and spend the night (relatively) cheaply in the woods, then spend the day hanging out on the Hudson doing their best imitation of a Knickerbocker or a Vanderbilt at their leisure … just like us!
We find a reasonable breakfast place, complete with cranky waitress, then head off on a hike that looks easy on the map, but which completely kicked my ass. I think we hiked about 1,200′ elevation and 4-5 miles. I am much happier doing such a thing at my own speed, but Natalie kept bounding ahead with the energy of youth and giving us “the look” for not being faster, and I was not digging it. But now that it’s over, it was quite an excellent hike overall – really stunning views of the Hudson Valley, more pretty leaves that you could imagine. We ate a too-expensive dinner in downtown Cold Spring, bought a coupla bundles of firewood at the gas station, then retired to our campground to burn wood and drink PBRs and yak away into the late night.
Sunday
Got up and did it all again! In a later, milder version. Ate a much better breakfast at a different Cold Spring place, then walked around the town for a couple of hours, which given how late we got going, took us to about 3:30. I was ready to get started on the next big thing, whatever that would turn out to be, since I had no idea where I was going to end up tonight and there were only a couple of hours of daylight to get to it.
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