Today stands as day 1 of the 2-day, or is it 3-day, weekend of our sorta-kinda honeymooning. If that’s not vague enough, I’m not sure how to be any less vague other than to say, “Maybe we went somewhere.” Today is also the first Mohonk day, and we were up by 7:00 am to ensure we would have time to wake up, eat breakfast, be packed, and be on our way in order to get there by 10:00 am. The intention was to enjoy as much of this as possible.
As a reminder, we would be spending 1 night & 2 days at the Mohonk Mountain House.
We were under the impression that we couldn’t get onto the grounds until 10:00 am, so we had some time to spare when we got into New Paltz. We stopped at Main Course Marketplace for a cup of coffee and a snack to bring with us for lunch. We had previously stopped here for a post-hike snack, which was on our fall visit to Mohonk with Alex & Mark. The idea today was to grab a coffee and maybe a muffin to eat for lunch later. But the food looked so good we sat down and had a second late breakfast. It was really tasty.
Knowing what I know now, we would have gone straight to the resort and had lunch on Sunday instead of Monday. You’re allowed 3 meals when you stay overnight, breakfast and dinner being set. For the 3rd meal, you can pick either lunch on day 1 or day 2. We went with day 2, but in hindsight day 1 makes more sense, since breakfast & lunch are pretty tightly coupled. So lunch-dinner-breakfast spaces it out better I think.
Having said that, our late breakfast was pretty good.
Following the meal we drove to the entrance and since we were guests, our name was on the list. They gave us a tag and waved us along. We drove up to the lodge and gave the car to the valet service, included in the price. Everything here is included, and there’s no tipping. That makes everything much easier for everyone. All the workers there are helpful, and the process is all very easy. Front gate, car, and check-in are simple and painless.
Being a Sunday, people were filtering out of the house, so it seemed pretty quiet overall. We had a little time and walk around a bit to take in the surroundings, just to absorb the house itself.
We hopped on the 11:15 am house tour, which we imagined would be a side-to-side, front-to-back expose of the house. In fact, it was more of a history of the house shown in just a few places not far from the main hallway. The guide went over the founding brothers’ story, and then some of the history of how things came to be the way they are today. It was interesting, though different than we expected.
After the tour, we rented XC skis which was one of the primary aims of this trip. We had talked about buying XC skis earlier in the winter, but D made the executive decision that this was going to be the year we went all-in for alpine skiing, and man what a great decision that was. However, we had this one itch to scratch, which was the XC ski itch. Today was the day to scratch it.
The conditions were less than ideal, and by that I mean there was probably barely enough snow coverage to have the trails open at all. In some spots it was dirt & mud. Mostly there was snow, but not everywhere. There wasn’t enough snow for them to have groomed tracks for the skis to glide in. So the trail was just a free-form pack most of the way.
We made it to the tower, the midpoint of the ride and the goal of the out-and-back. We had hiked here in the fall when we did the lemon squeezer thing, and there were a lot more people here at that time. The resort closes most of the trails to hiking, so the only way up is by snowshoe or XC ski. In all, maybe we saw 5 people at the top while we ate lunch, which was just a few snacks we had brought with us.
We turned around and went back down the way we came. In all, it was ok, which I guess is something considering it was my first time. I’m even more happy at this point that we decided to dedicate this year to alpine skiing and not XC skiing. The Strava link can be found here. In all 4.1 miles in just under 1.5 hours, with 370 feet of vertical. I have no frame of reference for any of this.
After we finished, we embarked on our absurd activity of the day. Maybe of the year, actually. We got ice skates from the skate shop, then did a few laps of the rink. Let me tell you, this is not easy, not easy at all. After the 2 laps we decided this box had been checked.
We then went back to the house and checked the desk, and our room was ready, so we grabbed our key and went up to get cleaned up and ready for the rest of the day. We did get to relax for a few minutes in the room before heading down, and in that time some new muscles that I wasn’t aware of started to make their soreness felt.
At 4:00 every day they have tea & cookies in the Lake Lounge, which is sort of the focal point of the house. It’s just off the main lobby and where most everything starts, like the house tour we had done earlier. The room is spacious, with places to sit spread around sporadically. One of the places is a fireplace, which we sat in front of when having our snack. The fire felt warm, and it was nice as since was a real fire, not a fake gas one.
At some point D found a partially completed puzzle on a table in another part of the room, and it drew her in. I laid on the couch next to her, and we listened to people talk while she finished the puzzle. A bit of the interest at this house is listening to people and hearing what their stories are. Behind us was a woman who has driven every car in the planet, feels “best” when she is in her Range Rover (her 3rd one) but thinks that her Mazda is the best car she has ever owned.
On the couch in the pic below was some weird couple who seemed to have a very long and hard-to-figure history. I’m not sure what their deal was.
While we sat in the lounge, snow started falling, which was splendid to look at. You can’t make the weather do what you want, but if I had been able to order it, this is what I would have asked for. The lights were really pretty outside, lit up like you see in the picture below. Our hope was to get a bit of snow overnight to help with the ski conditions for tomorrow.
Dinner was at 6:30 pm and we decided to go with the buffet over the 3-course sit down meal based on discussions with our friend Jason, who has been here a handful of times. It’s not fair to call this a buffet, as it’s more of a wedding cocktail hour than an all-you-can-gorge buffet. There were several stations where you could get any number of things carved, or cooked, or hand-made depending on which station you were in.
The quality of this food was legit, though we probably ate too much since we wanted to try some of everything. If I had this meal over, I would have picked only what I thought were the best options. Having said that, the food was solid. The meal was an array of very good food. Eating too much of it was on us.
The desserts were coconut-based which is not a big hit with us. We tried to pick out what we could, but in the end most of the desserts were a miss. The best to be had was the cheesecake.
The 9:00 entertainment was supposed to be humor columnist Mark Sherman, a writer for the New Paltz Times, giving a talk titled, “Real Men Don’t Write Columns.” We were both looking forward to this because for some reason, we had read it as “New York Times” and not “New Paltz Times” – or at least I had. In any event, Mark was scared off by the snow, which you can feel free to write your own humor column about since New Paltz is right next door. In any event, we ended up with Kevin, doing the Fireside sing along.
Yeah, so maybe it was corny, but it was something to do other than sit in the room and be tired. As you can see, it was SRO, or not.
Looking back at yesterday’s plan, the day went almost completely as expected. We deferred lunch by eating in New Paltz before we got here, and we managed to get the skating in, even if it was a whole 5 minutes. The 9:00 pm show was out of our control, but we took in what they had, and it was better than nothing. So credit them for putting something on for people to do before calling it a night, as opposed to just canceling altogether.
Somehow, we managed to have both a relaxing yet action-packed day. I guess that’s what a resort vacation is all about. You do a bunch of things, get to relax, and eat a bunch of good food. On that note, today was a total and complete success.
Traveling Normandy 