I was rather perturbed; because if the road was as bad as this near home, what would it be further along? But the further we went the better it became, and for the latter seventy or eighty miles it was perfect.
The Hudson River scenery, the lower end of it, always oppressed me; I can never think of anything but the favorite fiction descriptions of the “mansions where the wealthy reside.” Such overwhelmingly serious piles of solid masonry, each set squarely in the middle of a seed catalog painter’s dream of pictorial lawn! Steep hills, steep houses, steep expenditure, typify the lower Hudson, but the scenery a hundred miles above the river’s mouth is enchanting! Wide, beautiful views of rolling country; great comfortable-looking houses with hundreds of acres about them; here, though many are worth fortunes, one feels that they were built solely to answer the individual need of their owners, and as homes.
Out on a knoll, with the river spread like a great silver mirror in the distance, we christened our tea-basket. It took us five minutes to burrow down and unpile all the things we had on top of it, and five more to find in which compartment were huddled a few sandwiches and in which other box was the cake. For twenty minutes we boiled water in our beautiful little silver kettle, but as at the end of that time the boiling water was tepid, we gave it up and ate our sandwiches as recommended by the Red Queen in “Alice” who offered her dry biscuits for thirst. Then we spent fifteen minutes in putting everything away again.
Leaving Gramercy Park, New York
“When we get out on the prairies, where can we get supplies enough to fill it?” I wondered. Our “chauffeur” mumbled something about “strain on tires” and “not driving a motor truck.”
“It is a most wonderfully magnificent basket,” said the lady who was traveling with us, rather wistfully, as she braced all the heaviest pieces of luggage between her and it.
Not counting the time out for tea, which we didn’t have, it took us five hours and a half from Fifty-ninth Street, New York, to the Ten Eyck at Albany.
The run should have been one hundred and fifty miles, but we made it one hundred and sixty because we lost our way at Fishkill. We had no Blue Book, but had been told we need only follow the river all the way. At Fishkill the road runs into the woods and the river disappears until it seems permanently lost! We wandered around and around a mountain in a wood for about ten miles before we discovered a signpost pointing the way to Albany!