Dating my Husband
Another lovely holiday here and gone and way too much food eaten….I’m still eating it.
After Thanksgiving with my family my husband and I left our children with my mother, Noodle, as they call her, and took off for a VERY belated honeymoon. We haven’t been away, just the two of us, since 2015 or 16, and we were married in 2019, so we were due for a getaway.
Our destination? Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, NY.
I was a little disappointed. We had come during the off season so a lot of the things I wanted to see were closed or just not happening. The TaSh Farmers Market, which had been previously listed as running was nowhere to be found at Patriots Park. The threat of snow and the cold winds must have put an early halt to that.
The Tarrytown Music Hall was closed too. I really wanted to take a paranormal investigation tour.
We even missed the last tour at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, but that was still fun hiking through and looking up Rockefeller and Carnegie’s grave sites. I even grabbed some acorns for sacred protection after Gilda kept barking at a gravestone of two sisters buried side-by-side.
We stayed at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel in Tarrytown, which may have been one of my favorite parts of the trip. Just lazing around in a hotel with no responsibilities – except for letting little Gilda, our 9 month old Morkie, out to relieve herself.
The first morning, we found a cute diner downtown to get some coffee and, for me anyway, load up on carbs to get us through a day of walking.
Our first order of business was a walking tour of the Lyndhurst Mansion. It was no Biltmore, as my husband said, but it was still beautiful. Full of art, books, history, and the essence of the 3 families who left items every time they sold. Since it was a summer home, they didn’t feel the need to move all their furniture when they left.
William Paulding Jr. hired Alexander Jackson Davis to design and build what was first known as the “Knoll” mansion, which was completed in 1842 as a gothic style summer home on the Hudson.
In 1864, George Merritt purchased and rehired Davis to double the size of the mansion and renamed it Lyndenhurst (later shortened to Lyndhurst) after all the Lynden trees Merritt had planted on the property. He also built the massive greenhouse on the property, which made a brief appearance in the filming of the 1971 picture, House of Dark Shadows.
Jay Gould purchased Lyndhurst, and updated the interior design in 1880. The mansion stayed in the Gould family passing down from daughter to sister before Anna Gould, Duchess of Talleyrand-Perigord passed in 1961, bequeathing the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Between the Lyndhurst tour and our adventures through the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, we were pooped! A bottle of wine, some take out Italian, and we were passed out in front of a college football game in our cozy hotel room.
All in all, the rekindling, or rather, reminding of how much we enjoy each other’s company might have been the biggest take-away from our trip. The drive, the walks and the lazy evenings brought us closer, and reminded us that we are first and foremost, best friends.
The best words of advice I ever got from someone when I got married – “Never stop dating each other.”
Dandi-Rae Ink 