Stars in my eyes, I could only reply, "that's where Alexander Hamilton got married..." How I would love to see that!
 |
| We did see it. |
So we booked the vacation, and on Friday we boarded an Amtrak train to Penn Station to make our way upstate!
I cannot tell you enough how non-stressful it was. How quiet. Not only that, the room I got to stay in was adorable:
Antique wooden furniture? An old 1940s book of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales? A charming patchwork quilt? An affectionate cat? (His name was Shoelace.) Sign me the fuck up.
Sarah and I spent most of the weekend just relaxing at her aunt and uncle's house, watching old episodes of "Bob's Burgers" and playing Clue with her cousin and petting Shoelace a lot. Her uncle is a professional chef so we were well-fed. It was nice to do nothing for once, though on the first day I didn't really know what to make of it. I'm used to NYC being so fast paced, being so "what can I do next?!"
That being said, we did make room for a few excursions into Albany...
So what is there to do upstate, anyway?
The Schuyler Mansion
This is the only one we had planned ahead for. (Everything else we did was pretty spontaneous.) I wasn't going to visit Albany and not visit a place where Alexander Hamilton spent so much time! Naturally it was the first attraction we went to. I called ahead and got us spots on their Hamilton-focused tour, even though there was very little the tour guide said about the man that I didn't already know. Still, worth it.
 |
| In case anyone is curious, this is the room that Alexander and Elizabeth got married in |
For example, I learned they actually had five daughters, not three. I knew the musical left out their youngest daughter Catherine "Katie" Schuyler, but I completely forgot about second-youngest daughter Cornelia. (Of course, there was such an age gap, that in the song "The Schuyler Sisters", Cornelia would have been a baby and Katie wouldn't have even been born yet! Katie was the same age as her nephew, Alexander's oldest son Philip!)
I also learned that prior to the Revolution, having a dining room - a room just for dining and nothing else - was considered a luxury. Actually, I think I had read that before, but it never stuck in my mind until seeing a room in the Schuyler Mansion done up like a dining room. Philip Schuyler was Riiiiiich. Hamilton really did marry into money - though, his integrity was so great that he didn't accept any hand-outs from his father-in-law anyway.
I'd already known Angelica eloped, but I had no idea that after she did, her parents refused to speak to her for a very long time. She had to go through her mother's parents to get through to them! (They did eventually reconcile, and Philip learned to love John Church, Angelica's husband.) I learned that Cornelia Schuyler also eloped - but her parents never warmed up to her husband Washington Morton.
Also? Also? Fun fact - Theodore Roosevelt was descended from the Schuyler family.
The New York State Museum
The streets around the Schuyler Mansion were all named after prominent people associated with the Schuylers - we saw a Catherine St, an Elizabeth St, a Hamilton St, and an Angelica St - but also not too far from the historic home was the downtown area of Albany. And as Albany is the capital city of New York (which I did not know - honestly I thought it was Buffalo), it is home to the New York State Museum. Sarah's aunt didn't exactly have to twist my arm to get me to go here, I confess - especially since it's free.
Even though it's ostensibly a museum for the entire state of New York, a very large section of it was devoted just to New York City, a fact which I rather impishly pointed out to Sarah, telling her we "left New York City to see a museum exhibit about New York City."
There was a whole section devoted to 9/11 and another to Harlem in the 1920s. There were dioramas of Chinatown and of 5th Avenue in the Gilded Age, and there was even an old subway car! The most fun part of the New York City area, however, was a set from Sesame Street, complete with one of the old Oscar the Grouch muppets. Of course Sarah and I had to take a selfie with this celebrity!
Of course this wasn't the whole museum. There were other exhibits, including one on prehistoric New York with a mastodon skeleton. There was even one on the indigenous people of New York, complete with a replica longhouse you could sit in. (Which we did. We had been doing a lot of walking around at that point.)
On the top floor of the museum is a carousel from the 1880s-1910s (the horses pre-date the track) that people can still ride - though as they are also trying to keep it in good shape, they ask that riders only touch the poles, not the horses' faces. I'm all about historical preservation, but I'm even more all about carousels! When I go to any amusement park (yes, even when I went to Coney Island), the trip isn't complete without riding the carousel - I just love the things, especially when they're from the Gilded Age!
This particular carousel has a rather storied history. It was first used in Wellsville, New York, and was moved around a couple times (ending up in Cuba at one point) before ending up at the museum in the 1970s, though they didn't allow riders until 2011. As I said, some of the horses are older than the entire mechanism itself, and had been used on another carousel. Oh the things these horses have seen - they pre-date WWI! The carousel also has two deer and two donkeys, as well as two Neptune's chariots and one spinning tub that Sarah rode.
I'm not quite sure if I was imagining it or not, but it seemed to me that this carousel moved much faster than most carousels I've been on. I didn't mind, though. I was just delighted to be on it.
Howe Caverns
We'd done both the Schuyler Mansion and the New York State Museum on Saturday. Sunday was set up to be a lazy Sunday, but we did end up doing one excursion - Howe Caverns. My geology-loving ass just loves caves. Sarah also loves caves. Who doesn't love caves?
The cave is about a mile long, and was discovered in 1842 by a cow farmer named Lester Howe. It's full of stalactites and stalagmites made out of mostly calcite deposits (giving them a white colour) with fun nicknames like "the turtle" and "the pagoda", as well as limestone rock formations such as one called "Godzilla".
Cheesy-fun names aside, the cave also has an underground river, and near the end of the tour we got to take a twenty-minute boat ride on it. Sarah was really excited about that - it was adorable, the girl was practically vibrating with excitement. We sat in the front of the boat so we had the best views. Let me tell you, if you've never taken a boat ride through a cave, you're missing out.
 |
| "Godzilla" |
First off, the last part of the tour takes you through something they call "The Winding Way." It's a bunch of labyrinthine twists and turns, at some points as narrow as 18 inches wide. Walking through it is a bit disorienting, like being in an underground maze. I don't know why I enjoyed it, other than that something about it felt like being in an old myth or fairy tale or something. I love that feeling.
Second, the caverns sell their own cave-aged cheese, a semi-firm crumbly cheese that resembles cheddar but with a slightly milder, woodier, nuttier flavour. (I mayyyyy be a bit of a cheese nut.) Is it a bit gimmicky to sell cheese aged in the cave itself? Probably. Do I care? How could I when this cheese is so good?! We bought a block of it and finished it off by last night.
Back to New York City
Yesterday afternoon we made our way back to Penn Station by Amtrak. As good as vacation felt, as relaxing as it was, it is good to be back. Albany, I love you and thank you for showing us a good time. But New York City, it's nice to return.
-Nym
No comments:
Post a Comment