Vacationland Issue, 2019 (Intro)

The Hudson Valley Rethinks the Resort

Edible Hudson Valley/Edible Westchester, Spring 2019

By Julia Sexton

In response to the boom in tourism (and tourism investment) in the Hudson Valley, I led what we called "Vacationland" issues in 2019 and 2021. These were comprehensive itineraries for visitors and service journalism for locals. For this package, I won the 2020 Association of Food Journalists Award, 2nd Place Best Food/Travel Story. Use the Vacationland 2019 tag below to see other inclusions in this issue.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

All Yesterday's Parties

It’s interesting that the Hudson Valley is now coming to the attention of national travel writers. But we can always spot the tourist, can’t we? They generalize the ungeneralizable; labels, slogans and narratives like “hickster” are driven up the Taconic in Zipcars and they always make us natives cringe.

You and I know that there are many Hudson Valleys.

For instance, there’s the Woodstock where my family drinks the staggeringly delicious sangria (yes, even the children) of our distant relative, artist Julio de Diego. Adults not adulting, my uncle puts me on the back of his bike and we take off across the field behind the house. I scream and cling to him like baby chimp and I absolutely love it—insanely, I am a helmetless child with a sangria buzz, but the adults are far worse, talking loud art and politics in smoky clutches. I am burned by the exhaust pipe, but, forever after, I am lost to motorcycles.

Then there is the Hudson Valley of the wealthy couple who hire me to catalogue their library—all weighty, expensive and uncracked books on early American decorative arts and gardens—in a historic house where the rustic antiques are waxed so diligently that they emanate a lemony, expensive smell, and people wear waxed barn jackets (these smell of crayons), and there’s nowhere to comfortably put down a glass and so I hold it, admiring all that wax and those uncracked books stacked just so on the blue, milk-painted chest. There is a quincunx of apple trees in a walled garden and all the English Gripstand mixing bowls match.

Oh, Hudson! Where we slope off whenever we can patch together child care and any sort of flimsy excuse to go eat and drink and smoke and talk to new fascinating people who are all doing the same thing and we feel up nostalgic Space Age furniture and drink hair of the dog at Suarez Family Brewery before loading up more bottles for home.

And across the river there are the Catskills, where we tell funny/not funny “bear got into the garage/tent/kitchen” stories, and we crawl on our knees grabbing chanterelles while looking over our shoulders. It’s where we have spectacular and public chairlift fails and laugh over Jenny Creams about how my dad was annoyed with your dad for using nightcrawlers and getting far more trout than was ethical or reasonable because my dad was an angler and your dad liked to eat fish.

We remember the Thruway billboards that counted down miles to resorts that were ghost towns even then and are now just memories of a not sepia- but Technicolor-tinged America.

We know all these Hudson Valleys and we know that they’re our own.

JULIA SEXTON, Editor in Chief @juliasexton