About 100 miles away from the business of New York City is a small town called Ellenville, New York. Like any upstate town, it is small and quiet, full of nature and wildlife. In August, 2017, my best friend David moved from College Point, Queens back to his old home in Ellenville. I hadn’t seen him in months, so my boyfriend and I planned a four day trip for while I was back from college to go visit him and explore the area.
On Friday January 5, I met my boyfriend at the LIRR Hicksville station and we started our two and a half hour journey. It was a little more difficult than expected due to the blizzard the day before, but we soon left the city and made it upstate. We arrived at around 2:00 pm to see him waiting outside for us. We parked and soon celebrated being reunited with pizza and a multitude of snacks. We then went out to this cliff that overlooks the whole area. It was beautiful. You could see the lights in the snow covered houses, the trees, the mountains, it was gorgeous.
The next day we went to Sam’s Point Preserve. Where we climbed a snow and ice covered mountain and explored ice caves. The view from the top was stunning you could see all the surrounding mountains, creeks, and more. It was reaching up to -17° F with high winds. Afterwards we got lunch and headed to Stony Kills Falls. Unfortunately that didn’t work out so well for us. When we got there, it was closed off miles before the entrance and there was no parking nearby. And of course, as we turned around to leave we ran into car trouble. The catalytic converter of our Ford Escape had detached itself from the muffler. It was now a -17° F outside and we were stranded. We tried to the best of our abilities to fix it, but without something strong to tie it together we were pretty much screwed. After an hour and a half, our fingers and toes had lost all feeling and we had lost almost all hope. But then suddenly we saw a car driving down the mountain and were able to wave it down. This mountain man, who we later found out was named John, helped us tie it back up into place. And then we made our way back home, because we’d had enough adventuring for a day.
The next day we drove to the nearby town of Liberty, where the “Dirty Dancing” style Grossinger Hotel was, which had been abandoned many years ago. Our goal was to explore the grounds and many of the other nearby hotels that were abandoned. But unfortunately car trouble struck again. And as we were going to park nearby, the catalytic converter fell off again. And we were forced to get it fixed at a (surprisingly open) repair shop nearby. We got it fixed and attempted to find a less obvious way into the hotel grounds, but to no avail. We were able to take pictures of the surrounding lakes and fields, but then we decided to head back to David’s house.
On our last day we left early, due to an incoming sleet storm. We left at 10:00 am. And stopped to take pictures of the landscape on the way home. After a little over two and a half hours in the car, we made it back safely to Oakdale. We are definitely going to visit again in the summer.
