Our stops along the Hudson River north of New York City included Croton-on-Hudson (Half Moon Bay Marina), Poughkeepsie (Shadows Marina), Kingston (Hudson River Maritime Museum docks), New Baltimore (Shady Harbor Marina) and Waterford (Town Docks). Weather and scenery were both delightful -- lots of mountains, bridges and lighthouses.
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| Tappan Zee Bridge expansion work |
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| New Jersey Palisades |
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| Croton on Hudson, Half Moon Bay Marina |
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| Neighbors at Half Moon Bay Marina |
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| Bear Mountain Bridge: Very sentimental for me. I have 1940s photos of our family vacationing at the Bear Mountain Inn. |
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| West Point: United States Military Academy |
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| Faculty/Officers' houses at West Point |
Shadows Marina in Poughkeepsie has beautiful new docks in a great location, but also lots of wind that day, which made docking the boat a challenge. As we approached the marina, I saw this bridal party also struggling with the strong winds:
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| Shadows Restaurant and Marina, Poughkeepsie, NY |
Friends Adelaide (June's college classmate) and husband Peter, both retired Vassar professors, treated us to a warm Poughkeepsie welcome, including home-cooked meals, a trip to the outstanding Farmer's Market in Rhinebeck and a tour of the lovely Vassar campus.
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| Howard and Adelaide in Rhinebeck |
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| Vassar |
We also spent a day with a rental car visiting the Walmart in Fishkill for necessities and FDR's home and Presidential Library & Museum in Hyde Park.
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| Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt home in Hyde Park NY |
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| The view from FDR home. |
Each morning at Shadows Marina in Poughkeepsie, we enjoyed watching rowers gliding past us and under the twin bridges -- the Mid-Hudson and the Walkway Over the Hudson, a former railroad bridge now for pedestrians and bicycles. This is the exact location for many years of the National Collegiate and Olympic trials rowing events. If you watch the recent PBS documentary, Boys of '36, about the US rowing team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, you will see several vintage film clips of this spot and these bridges.
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| Tranquility on the Hudson |
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| At Shadows Marina, the Mid-Hudson Bridge and Walkway Over the Hudson Bridge |
As we prepared to leave Poughkeepsie, the starboard engine wouldn't start. This event caused a few hours of diagnostics, along with Keith, the dockmaster and experienced boat captain. We spent the rest of the morning changing fuel filters and cleaning the fuel lines which had gotten clogged with debris from fuel tanks on the boat that hadn't been used in a few years. After the repairs, the engine started right up, but the day had gotten away from us, so we spent the remainder of that day lounging on the back deck.
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| Mid-Hudson Bridge; a different color scheme each night. |
The next morning we left for Kingston, NY. Along the way, we passed the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. We had hoped to dine at one of their restaurants, but got to Poughkeepsie one day after CIA began its August break. From the road, one can see it is a very large campus, but from the river, only a few buildings are visible:
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| Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park NY |
In Kingston, we stayed at the Hudson River Maritime Museum docks and enjoyed the museum's exhibits. There were several restaurants within a few minutes walk from these docks in the historic waterfront district, but not much else there. We ate at the Italian restaurant--decent food, and enough of it to take back to the boat for another meal.
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| Hudson River Maritime Museum, Kingston NY |
The next morning we got the bikes down from the boat, and biked 5 miles into Kingston to the Stockade Historic District:
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| Senate House Museum, Kingston NY, where the first NY legislature met in 1777. |
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| Four Corners: Only intersection in America where the buildings on all corners were built before the Revolutionary War. |
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| One of the Four Corners buildings |
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| Dutch Reformed Church, 1852, with Tiffany window. The congregation was organized in 1659. |
Our next stop was Shady Harbor Marina in New Baltimore, just south of Albany. We didn't need to stop here, but we had read a lot about this marina, so we thought we'd give it a try. One of the ads mentioned that they would take transients into town to the food store, but when I asked about this, they told us they they were short staffed and couldn't do the trip until the next day--and that the couldn't let us use the courtesy car. Later that afternoon, we asked again and the dock hand called the owner who told him to give us the key to the car, so we drove ourselves into Ravena, NY, to the Shop and Save and bought a few things (that we probably didn't need). We had dinner on the deck of Boathouse Grille, to the left in the photo below. Good food, nice Hudson River view.
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| Shady Harbor Marina, New Baltimore NY |
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| On the docks at Shady Harbor Marina |
Next stop: Waterford NY, where the Hudson River meets the Erie Canal.
