Beautiful Hudson Valley

Today is a day in Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park, which is about four miles from Poughkeepsie.

The only thing actually on the agenda today was to go to the FDR birthplace and museum. On the way there, we went to the Culinary Institute of America which is an incredible campus. I thought, oh yeah, a really good cooking school, but probably no big deal.

WRONG. It’s a beautiful campus, for one thing, with charming buildings and which obviously gets donations from big people in the food business – big enough donations that they then get buildings named after them. We thought we’d just like to walk around the campus, because it’s really pretty, and after we’d spent an hour there, we realized we should have taken a tour because I think it would have been really interesting. One of the things they obviously stress is that the students should e friendly to the “customers” so students were very friendly and outgoing .

I asked at the admissions desk how much it cost to go there. $33K a year, and it’s a 38 month program for a bachelors, 26 for an AA. It was interesting to watch the students and look into the classrooms. One room had a bunch of students in a “theater” (high raked seats) and in front of each student were about 10 wine glasses. There were people baking, making some sort of wraps, and a bunch of other things. It was just so interesting and the energy in the place was really different from other schools.

We had a cookie in the bakery, which was sad, because there were so many good things to eat and I was just too full from last night’s dinner. Damn. I took a few pictures before I found out you weren’t allowed.




We finally tore ourselves away from there and went up the road a couple of miles to see the FDR museum and library and the house he was born in. Roosevelt was the first president to establish a library, and the only one to actually use it during his lifetime. His mother died only about 4 years before he did and he basically always lived in the same house she did (with the exception of the NY Governor’s mansion and the White House.) Roosevelt is also buried on the property in a rose garden. (The name Roosevelt is a kind of contraction for some Dutch words that mean field of roses.)


After we finished that tour we left and went on to the William Vanderbilt house. It was a mansion built for $2.2 million in the 1890s. He had no children and when he died left his money to childrens charities, one of his nieces and 30 of his servants. Some of the servants got about $1000 apiece, the groundsman got $250 K plus a house on the property. He was not a favorite of his father, and inherited the least of the family estate, but was the only one of his five siblings to leave more money than he inherited.

The rest of our day was spent doing laundry (yay – clean clothes) and trying to find downtown Poughkeepsie. We’re not sure whether we did or not. If we did, downtown is a dump. We ended up having dinner at an Italian place near our hotel which wasn’t bad, but certainly wasn’t actually good.

Tomorrow we will spend the day driving up the Hudson valley to Albany where we will get rid of our rental car, stay overnight, and take the train to NYC on Friday.