Sunday drivers

We often take long Sunday drives, with Anna strapped in happily in the back seat and a "car picnic" packed. We'll go out looking at galleries, nurseries, museums, or even just wander around some town and check out the "housing stock", see if the aluminum siding salesmen had hit town or not, at some sad point in the last 30 years or so.

We often drive up to Tivoli, have a look at Bard's performing arts center and walk the little village from end to end. Beacon is a favorite if we want to check out the galleries, see what other people have got going. Rhinebeck is beautiful, and (almost too) perfectly preserved and updated. Red Hook is lovely, too, and worth a stop if only for this store.

And always, our favorite outing, is Hudson, with its long, grand Warren Avenue of shops, galleries, antiques (and more antiques),restaurants, refurbished (and not) townhouses and The Spotty Dog Books & Ale-one of those rare places where we can hang out and drink pints of beer with a happily occupied three year old looking at great wooden toys and playing Connect Four in the bar. And then float up the street for organic pizza. Like a dream come true.

But we didn't do any of these things this Sunday. As we set out over the Tappan Zee the weather was grey and rainy,

but the sky gradually began to clear up.

Our plan was to drive to Warwick, NY, a town neither of us had ever laid eyes on but we've been hearing a lot about lately. There was an interesting interview with the mayor there in The Valley Table's last issue, and we knew of an organic farm there we thought we might check out. What we hadn't counted on were the 30,000 people who were also driving to Warwick yesterday for the Applefest...an event that was quite impressive in size, but is pretty much a prime example of our worst nightmare. We didn't get out of the car. We also couldn't find the farm, even with the address and a Google map, but we did find a nice cornfield to park next to and have our car picnic.

So, instead, we drove back over the Bear Mountain Bridge, with the weather at this point near-perfect, and headed up the east coast of the Hudson to Garrison.

There we could let the three year old stretch those little legs on the shore of the Hudson, run and climb (Tim says there's an unspoken rule that sculptures out-of-doors are fair game?),

while we could have a look at the current show at the Garrison Art Center,

and my favorite part, its pottery studio.

In the end, another beautiful Sunday drive. The best part, as usual: arriving back in our neighborhood-all blue skies and falling leaves at 5 o'clock-to find neighbors' kids and dogs running in the park, our little house waiting for us in the afternoon sun, and being so grateful that the road, for us, winds back here.

Home. Thanks for reading.

tt