Start from 70 curated places around Hudson Valley, NY, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Lil' Deb's Oasis
A neon-bright tropical-comfort-food spot in Hudson serving whole fried fish, ceviche, and Latin-Caribbean plates with a serious natural-wine list. Loud, playful, queer-owned, and one of the region's most acclaimed kitchens.
Cafe Mutton
A tiny Hudson daytime cafe with an idiosyncratic, frequently changing menu built around in-house sausages, buckwheat scones, offal, and country pates. Chef-driven breakfast and lunch that does not coast.
Trails & outdoors
Overlook Mountain Trail
A roughly 4.7-mile out-and-back near Woodstock climbing a wide old road about 1,400 feet to the ruins of a former mountain hotel and a restored fire tower with a 360-degree Catskills-and-Hudson view. Steady grade, no scrambling.
Bonticou Crag Trail
A short, intense Mohonk Preserve hike near New Paltz that climbs through forest to a steep boulder field, then a hands-and-feet scramble up bright-white quartz cliffs to a ridge view. Big payoff for the distance.
Things to do
Bardavon 1869 Opera House
The oldest continuously operating theater in New York State, a 944-seat 1869 house in downtown Poughkeepsie with music, dance, theater, classic films, and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. The valley's marquee historic stage.
Ulster Performing Arts Center
A restored 1927 1,500-seat theater in uptown Kingston, the larger sister venue to the Bardavon, hosting touring music, comedy, and dance. The big-name stop in Ulster County.
Landmarks & sights
Dia Beacon
Minimalist and conceptual art from the 1960s to now inside a former Nabisco box-printing plant lit almost entirely by daylight through sawtooth skylights. Richard Serra torqued-steel ellipses, a Donald Judd wing, Louise Bourgeois, Walter De Maria. For people who want serious large-scale work without museum crowding.
Storm King Art Center
Five hundred acres of rolling fields, hills, and woods studded with monumental outdoor sculpture by Calder, di Suvero, Goldsworthy, and Serra. The land itself is the gallery; works are sited to the terrain rather than crowded together.