Farewell Hudson Valley

The first town we stopped at was Rhinebeck which is supposed to be a cute little town (yes) with the oldest inn in America from 1766 (maybe). The inn is lovely and looks to be in the style of the period, and they’ve furnished it to remind you of that, but realistically, it’s probably so remodeled that it’s nothing but the same foundation anymore. The most interesting building to me was a restaurant that obviously used to be a church or something. It looked very neat. It’s kind of an American wood gothic in brown.

We stopped at a cute bakery called Bread Alone, but we had some really dense chocolate cake, maybe a flourless one. We walked around, checked out an art shop and an antique shops and decided to move on.


The next town we headed for was Hudson. Our tour book had said that Hudson had seen better days – the part I remembered, but as I look at it now, it also said it was second-home territory for New Yorkers (this meaning folks from NYC) and an antiques mecca. That it is. There must be 20 antiques stores on the main street. Looks like a place where the trade shops as well.

We had planned to go to Olana, the home Frederic Church, of one of the best known and most successful artists of the second generation of the Hudson River school, but again, we couldn’t find it. This was mostly because John is obsessed with following the map, even if the signs say something different. After about the third antique store we looked at, a dealer told us how to get to the house. His directions weren’t perfect, but we finally found it. It was well worth the aggravation. The place is best described as Islamic-Victorian. It’s very interesting, both inside and outside with all the Islamic décor and yet a lot of the closed-in fussiness of Victorian and of course the necessity of keeping warm in New York in the winter. He had wonderful views from the house, often framed by arched windows. We were the only two people on our tour.



After the tour, we still had a little time to go back to town and check out a few more antique shops. Not much to my taste, frankly, and none of the shops around here have any A&C antiques. But there were some pretty nice Art Deco things, including all these chairs.

We stopped and had a really delicious pizza at Baba Louie’s then went on to Albany. I’m thinking I won’t get to publish this tonight because though this hotel has so-called free wi-fi, I can only get on it for a second or two at a time.