Valentine's Day - Downstate NY

As you may have noticed, we've been a little delinquent with timely posts. Sorry! Our joint New Year's resolution is to get back into the swing of things with our blog, so here we go! Throwing it way back to the 3rd year of medical school, aka 2013-2014, we begin our updates...


Our amazing trip to Italy was an incredible way to celebrate the end of 2nd year and gear up for the chaos of 3rd year. The first two years of medical school are mostly classroom based with a small amount of clinical work, and the second two years are almost the exact opposite! Lots of switching clinical specialties (OB/GYN -> Pediatrics -> Neurology -> Psych -> Medicine (Adults) -> Surgery!), clinical settings (hospital wards, clinic offices, operating rooms, etc), and clinical teams (working with new residents and attendings almost every two weeks!). You have to be flexible!!! The work hours are also longer and more hectic, which of course cuts into our adventure time. We didn't do anything super exciting during the fall and early winter, but once I had survived my Surgery rotation we decided to celebrate by going on a fancy Valentine's Day B&B weekend!

We traveled downstate to Saugerties, NY which is along the beautiful Hudson River. We stayed at The Renwick Clifton House in a very stately room with FABULOUS breakfast every morning. Being Valentine's Day weekend, we got a special package that included chocolate-covered strawberries with wine upon arrival and were served delicious chocolate waffles for breakfast! Yum!

The only issue with the room was the stink bug invasion, and unfortunately they only decided to fly around at night while we were trying to sleep. :-(   

Irony?

Otherwise, a great place to stay! We even saw deer wandering through the snowy backyard and had a great view of the Hudson River. We even got to stay snuggly warm inside and watch some of the Sochi Olympics.

 
Our first big adventure this weekend was in Minnewaska State Park, where we went snowshoeing for the first time! The snow was pretty powdery, so we sunk a little here and there...fell a bunch of times as we got used to walking with snowshoes on. Certainly one of the most peaceful and picturesque things we have ever done. Snow gently falling...everything covered in white fluff...hardly a sound to be heard. Beautiful!

Then we swung by a hiking trail that lead to a couple frozen waterfalls...

After a long day of hiking, we swung by an eclectic little restaurant called New World Home Cooking Co. We had really tasty food - the Thai Italian Love, coconut curry/Bolognese mash-up was awesome! Also enjoyed a hot totty to warm-up after being out in the cold all day. Then we headed back to the B&B to rest our achy bones!

The next day we reluctantly checked out after another delicious breakfast, but of course had time to make a couple more stops before heading back to Ra-cha-cha. Stop #1: Saugerties Lighthouse.



Frozen Hudson River



Purple Martin at the Purple Martin House!

Very windy!!! Gotta protect our beautiful faces.

Stop #2: Hyde Park, NY to check out the FDR Presidential Library plus his lifelong home and family estate - Springwood. We got to take an excellent guided tour of the house, and even had enough time to spin through the really fancy library chronicling FDR and Eleanor's lives. Really interactive displays and an excellent depiction of a complex time in American history. A must see!

Our last stop before heading home was at a little Italian place, Emiliani Ristorante, in Saugerties so we could have an official, romantic V-day dinner. A nice way to cap off a lovely weekend adventure!

-The Lorax-