Albany Alpine Club

Today JP and I set out on one of his patented Cute Little Hudson Valley Town Adventures.  Our conversations usually include a lot of, “Oh my god, well that couldn’t be any cuter!” Whether it’s a Kinkadeian farmhouse or a cheese and antique store (more on this later) or a teeny tiny trickle of a stream in the middle of the woods, we’re pretty much always on the lookout for anything precious.  And today we were just on overload.  Our plan was to go on a, “short hike,” up Sugarloaf in the Catskills: about three miles up and two miles back in a loop. On the way there we stopped at Opus 40, which is an overwhelming display of sculptor Harvey Fite’s life’s work.  It’s kind of like if Martians came and the first two things they Wiki’d were ‘M.C. Escher’ and ‘Grand Canyon’ and then they decided to throw them together in Saugerties. It’s beautiful.  After we’d gotten our fill of bluestone we set off up the mountain.  Ok, so, I like to walk and I’m pretty outdoorsy and not a princess about things but neither JP nor I realized that our five mile walk was going to be straight up a mountain, like, hand over hand pulling ourselves up a vertical rockface.  Poor JP released me after we’d been climbing for a couple hours and had made it up within about a half mile of the summit where I broke down in tears.  We turned around (and I even took an alternate, easy route out while he got the car) soon thereafter and drove in to Tannersville for a few well-deserved drinks and dinner at Last Chance Cheese/Antiques/Cafe.  It was a lovely meal capped off by a conversation with an amusing local who guessed IQs (how’s that for a party trick?) and had a penchant for indecent exposure.  Adorable.