Don’t let that last post fool you – we’ve had plenty of time to play while we’ve been here too!
Living at the club while we’re up north is awesome. We’re in a super-protected spot, we get to see our friends and make new ones, have dinner/drinks at the club and use the pool. There are a couple other cruisers at the club, and we arranged dinner with one of the couples who had just returned from a summer season in Maine and Nova Scotia. It was awesome to hear about their travels and pick their brains about traveling farther north, which we hope to do soon.
The other great thing about living at the club is that Glen Island Park is in our back yard, and it’s a beautiful spot to start or end the day. We go for walks almost every morning, and we even started running together later in the season. We got to enjoy both summer and fall, and I found that on the days I was getting most stressed by departure prep, our morning walks were the reset I desperately needed.
We have an incredible tribe, especially the friends we’ve made over the past five years at Huguenot, and they’re a good part of the reason we go back to NY. We were excited to get back to racing on Rushmore. Nothing’s better than getting out on a Thursday night and catching a sunset on the water with some good friends or heading out for a weekend race series. I even ended up trimming main during a light air, rainy Larchmont Race Week. When Rushmore was out of commission for some repairs, we got to crew on our friend’s J/80, Upsetter, and at the end of the Can One season, we joined race committee for the final race of the season. Even though conditions weren’t ideal, I got to shoot the start and scratch my race photography itch.
HYC has a great junior sailing program, and in the middle of their summer session, they host a regatta that’s open to the other yacht clubs in our area of the western sound. I’ve been going out to shoot the races since I joined the club, and it’s always a lot of fun. This year, our commodore was kind enough to donate his time and his boat to be the spectator/photo boat, and we had a beautiful day on the water.
This year, were around long enough to attend Decommissioning for the first time. Maybe it’s nerdy, but I like the tradition and ceremony of Commissioning and Decommissioning, and it was nice to be able to go. We had good weather, and the entertainment committee put on a nice cocktail party afterwards.
Aside from returning to club life, we took the chance to do some land-based activities too. We braved the traffic and spent a week visiting family on Cape Cod and even took a day to ourselves to play tourist and pick up some Cape Cod favorites (beach plum and rose hip jellies and cranberry preserves).
As a kid, one of my favorite fall activities was going apple picking, and it’s still one of my favorite ways to spend a fall day. We headed up to Warwick Valley Winery & Distillery, which has a nice orchard, live music, food, and some really good hard ciders. We kicked off the day with a cider tasting and lunch, then headed out into the orchard. We were there early enough in the day that it wasn’t until our bag was nearly full that we started seeing a crowd, and we were there at that sweet spot in the season where lots of varieties are ripe and very little is picked over.
We’ve always wanted to go to the fall boat show in Annapolis, so we took advantage of another crappy weekend to drive south. What took us 34 hours in the fall took 4 1/2 hours by car! Even though it was raining when we got there, we broke out the foul weather jackets and soldiered on. The funny thing about the boat show was how much like cruising life it was. We caught up with lots of friends, made some new connections, and as we were chatting with one of the brokers, we all realized he’d dinghied over to say hi in Hope Town because he’d sold Windara to her previous owners! We had fun checking out all the boats (and realizing there wasn’t one there that we wish we had more than our own) and got some good deals on gear we needed/wanted. After the show on Saturday, we went over to the Eastport Yacht Club for their Party in the ‘Port – they had a really great band and we had fun dusting off what we could remember from dance.
For the first time in a few years, we took a couple nights to go out in Manhattan. We had dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, San Carlo Osteria Piemonte, met up with a couple of our college friends who we haven’t seen in ages, and checked out Fotografiska. Back in Westchester, Charles and Nancy met us for dinner at Pizzeria La Rosa (which became a new favorite) and a couple weeks later we drove up to the Paramount Hudson Valley Theater to catch a Led Zeppelin cover band with them. I miss going to shows, and it was nice to catch some live music.
It’s always hard saying goodbye at the end of the season, and while I wanted to be moving earlier, I was glad for the extra “land life” time.