"Founded by the Smiley Family in 1869, our Victorian castle resort is nestled in the Hudson Valley, only 90 miles north of New York City. Surrounded by 40,000 acres of pristine forest, our National Historic Landmark resort offers farm to table cuisine and an award winning spa"
That's pretty accurate and fourth and fifth generation Smileys are running the resort even today.
It feels like a little piece of history that's been maintained in a pristine condition for a hundred years. Although, in fact, they just spend a lot of money to make it look that way, which makes it a tad expensive.
Our room had a real fireplace (they would run firewood up to on request) and a fantastic view of the Hudson valley. The dining room was large and formal; sports coat or suit suggested (although Dave was one of the few actually wearing one).
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Day one, we did the hike up the sky top road to the watch tower, built in 1921 in memory of Albert K. Smiley, then the lake shore trail in the afternoon. The sky top road is a steep but wide trail climbing up along the cliffs on the far side of the lake from the resort, providing spectacular views of the one-eighth-mile long building and the surrounding countryside. According to the brochure, you can see six states from the top of the watch tower.
 of course they have a coy pond |
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So, before we go on, one little thing about the Mohonk Mountain House that was fun; it's icon is not the hotel, but the small gazebos - more accurately called summerhouses - that line the trails. They are all works of art, made from trees that were in some cases standing on the spot the summerhouse was built. In a photo below, you can see Alison lying on the ground taking a shot of a summerhouse ceiling. They were that beautiful, and a topic of considerable conversation even back in 1870. Here's a little information about them:
Thus enter the summerhouses, or gazebos as they are commonly
misnamed: the rustic, roughhewn structures that dot the entire Mohonk
campus, providing respite and vistas for hikers. The summerhouses are
Mohonk’s flagship feature, reminders that Mohonk is not about nature per
se; it is about the first artistic cut by humans into nature, the DIY
aesthetic impulses to shape the wild with one’s hands.
The Mohonk summerhouses were inspired by the work of the landscape
designer Andrew Jackson Downing, whose summerhouse designs were a
fixture at the great family estates along the Hudson. A summerhouse
differs from a gazebo mostly by being considerably more raw. The gazebos
of Europe tended to be built of finished lumber. They featured screens
and cushions, a few layers of insulation between person and the world of
dirt and flies.
Summerhouses like those at Mohonk were originally fashioned out of
unfinished poles by “rustic carpenters”: farmers mostly, with good
carpentry skills. The amateur artisans were instructed to use the
materials they could find at hand – American chestnut, usually – and to
use their imaginations regarding the design of the house. This is my
favorite fact about the Mohonk summerhouses. With one notable exception,
they were truly improvised. No two are alike, and no designs exist on
paper except for the one exception: the two-level summerhouse in the
main garden.
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Day two, we did the Labyrinth. So, sure, the sign said "only for young, healthy people that aren't afraid of falling to their death as they leap across giant crevices" and things of that nature, but we'd seen pictures of Victorian era woman in long dresses and large, fashionable hats entering it. How hard could it be?
Pretty darned hard, as it turned out. Dave, who insisted he only needed to bring one pair of jeans on the trip, learned that even jeans will shred on sharp rock edges if you're scrambling over fissures and wiggling through keyhole sized gaps in a landscape of tumbled rocks thrown by giants.
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In the afternoon, we visited the barn museum (which was interesting, even if it was things saved more or less haphazardly over the 150 years of the place's existence) and took a look at the ice skating rink, which was nice enough that we've made reservations to go back in January.
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The last day, before we left, we did the iconic boat ride in the iconic boat on the iconic boat lake in front of the iconic hotel.
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This shot is actually from the prior night; Alison labeled it "Disneyland without the Disney"
From Mohonk, we headed to the finger lakes region of New York to visit Corning and the Corning Glass Museum, the largest glass Museum in the world. Along the way, we stopped at the Taigo Historical Society Museum, which had removed almost all of its displays for the annual Christmas Tree auction (really).
We had a chance to visit the small but quaint downtown and have dinner at one of the local pubs that had huge sandwiches and two thousand kinds of whiskey.
The next day, it was the Corning Glass Museum (or the Corning Museum of Glass as they mistakenly call it). It had a little of everything... demonstrations, art, history, paper weights. Plus we could participate in making our own glass pumpkins, which was kind of awesome. Participate meant we stepped on a little petal to blow air into the molten glass when told, but we rocked at it.
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 Mockable? Certainly |
 Tiffanys? Of course |
 A lot of history with glass |
 World's biggest collection I suspect |
 Beautiful, but still mockable |
 Fun with glass |
Master pumpkin maker
The next day, we visited the Rockwell Museum (nothing to do with Norman Rockwell, it was a department store owner who collected enough stuff to fill a museum). It was well done, if small, well worth a couple of hours. They had a smattering of native American art, some classic southwestern pieces (mostly of native Americans), a display called "Fingerprints of Place - Taiwan" that was modern art and therefore mockable, and one room of photographs of local residents called "From the Shadows" that was actually wonderful; the photos were well done and caught a cross section of people, from school teachers to executives, with small notes about them, giving you a surprising deep view of the community.
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In the afternoon, we were supposed to hike Watkin's Glen, a fairly steep hike past 19 waterfalls, but it was raining so we went wine tasting instead. The winemakers did the typical thing of saving the best for last, because the wine got better and better the more we tasted.
We had a quiet dinner in town that evening and heading back on Sunday, arriving home it time to have Alison's folks over for our standard Sunday dinner and a movie.
