Oh How Beautiful

On the Hudson River
N 41 36.155 W 73 57.281

Nyack lives up to it's reputation. It is a delightful little place to visit. We went ashore this morning and showered at the Nyack Boat Club. That is an excellent boat club with wonderful facilities and very friendly staff and members. If we lived some place near by I would be very happy to be a member of that boat club. The same comments apply to the Capitol Boat Club in Washington, but I think one needs to be a millionaire to afford that place.

AFter hour shower, we walked around the town. It is filled with small shops and restaurants of all kinds. Nyack obviously has no big box stores nearby. We saw some of the biggest and most beautiful and exquisitely maintained houses ever in Nyack. They were so big that they would make our place on Union Street in Schenectady's Stockade look tiny. I tried to take pictures of some of them, but I had trouble standing back far enough to get the whole house in the lens. Anyhow, Libby and I never
heard of Nyack when we lived in New York, but it is a lovely little place to visit.

The populace amused us. We saw a lot of people too old to be yuppies. They appeared to be affluent, so they weren't upwardly mobile any more. Yet they seemed desperate to maintain that yuppie image so they walked around looking silly in their spandex bicycling outfits. I invented a word to describe them. Paternal Urban Pretender in singular, or puppies in plural.

We had coffee and a turnover at a nice coffee shop, and we ate a delicious lunch at a Greek lunch counter. Then it was time for the tide to turn in the river so we had to leave.

With the tidal current with us we make great time. We've averaged 7.4 knots for this afternoon. We learned from past trips; it doesn't pay to travel against the current in the Hudson River.

The portion of the river between Peekskill and Newburgh, including West Point, Storm King Mountain, and Pollepel Island with Bannerman Castle is just too beautiful to describe. The river is enclosed by mighty wooded mountains on both sides with the shore lines formed by the cliffs plunging directly in to the water. Even the river is very deep here, 180 feet deep. There is a flat place to make a boat landing at West Point, but I suspect that it is man made.

Past this stretch, one comes to Newburgh and Beacon. Here, on a clear day one is treated to wonderful views of the Catskill Mountains to the West. Unfortunately today is a very hazy day so we didn't get to see those scenes.

I recommend to all our friends that they arrange to see the lower Hudson River by boat. You can't see it from any road or from the train or from a plane -- only by boat. There are cruise boats leaving from Poughkeepsie that will take you down to New York City and back to Poughkeepsie in the same day. Do yourself a favor and take that trip. If you can arrange to do it in the first week of October when the fall colors are in their peak, so much the better.

Tonight we plan to stay in Poughkeepsie and tomorrow night to stay in Kingston. Our friend Nan from West Charlton is going to come down and sail with us.