Hudson Valley Updates

Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park:

On Market Street in Rhinebeck, this . . .

. . . is now this:

We visited Dia Beacon back in September 2021. I thought I already had pictures of Dia, having visited there sometime in the aughts, so I let our then-seven-year-old have fun with my phone. He ended up spamming like 200-plus images. I straightened the orientation but for the most part otherwise mostly preserved the compositions (I did this one other time at the Natural History Museum back in 2016.)

Some images looked just like this:

Or this:

And they were all portrait orientation, lol, so it *looked* like the perspective of a seven-year-old, with everything at the top half of the frame:

But sometimes that top-half composition looked surprisingly, I don’t know, composed:

He kept circling back to the Richard Serra pieces for some reason:

And there were some fun unexpected compositions that surfaced from that:

This day I think I only took these, by the way:

So hilariously I came to realize that I actually *don’t* have any pictures of Dia from when we visited before — as I suspected, you used to not be able to take pictures inside the galleries (nowadays it seems you can take pictures everywhere because social media I guess — they’ll even let you take a picture of the curtain call at a Broadway show). Anyway, thus the Dia Beacon pics.

Beaver Pond Campground in Harriman State Park:

Metro-North Hudson Line:

Westchester County Updates

LEGOLAND Discovery Center Westchester in Yonkers:

Elsewhere in Yonkers, Trevor Park and the JFK Marina and Park just off the Glenwood Metro-North station:

The Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, which traces the path of the original tunnel that brought water to New York City from reservoirs upstate, runs mostly uninterrupted for 41 miles from the city to Croton Gorge Park near Croton-on-Hudson. This section of trail is just south of the park:

This is one of several stone ventilator shafts used to circulate air through the aqueduct:

At Croton Gorge Park, the nearly 300-foot-high New Croton Dam holds back the New Croton Reservoir behind it:

Turkey Mountain Nature Preserve near Yorktown Heights:

Hardscrabble Wilderness Area in Briarcliff Manor:

Sledding at Gedney Park near Millwood:

Mount Kisco:

The charming The Hamlet British Store right by the train station in Mount Kisco has tons of imported goodies:

Cranberry Lake Preserve near the Kensico Reservoir and North White Plains:

Stone quarried from what is now Cranberry Lake Preserve built the dam which you can see at Kensico Dam Plaza:

“The Rising” is Westchester County’s 9/11 Memorial:

Suffolk County Updates

Jungle Bob’s Reptile World:

Next door, “Our Place II,” with its promise of “warm beer, tasteless conversation and no food” is sadly now just “My Place Tavern”:

Riverhead‘s Long Island Aquarium:

This was during the COVID era, when people were encouraged to limit travel to one’s own state. Face masks:

The Big Duck in nearby Flanders:

Love Lane in Mattituck, coincidentally on Valentine’s Day: