America Vacation Spot : Judson Valley and the Catskills

Let’s move up the Hudson Valley now. The Hudson River has been compared with the Rhine in its scenic splendor, but it is dramatically American is in its historical associations. Shortly after seeing the splendid Palisades, and viewing the river from Palisades Interstate Park, the visitor comes to Bear Mountain, where there's a friendly inn with an enormous stone fireplace, and pleasant Adirondack-type stone lodges, all in a very attractive state park a little more than an hour's drive north of the city. About fifteen minutes further along is the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

If you head west from Bear Mountain, you'll soon be in the Catskill Mountains, site of a huge state park, but far more famous as a truly unique vacation area, perhaps the greatest concentration of small and large resort hotels and inns in the world. The Catskills, easily accessible from New York City, got their start as a resort center with inexpensive boarding houses. The most celebrated was Grossinger's, which has grown to a huge, 690-room resort rambling over 1,200 mountain acres with its own post office (Grossinger, N. Y.) and a landing field for small planes. Its greatest rival is the even larger (1000-room) Concord, at Monticello, but there are many other large hotels in the area offering facilities for practically every sport imaginable and a nighttime entertainment program that rivals those of New York and Las Vegas. Many of the top stars of the theater, nightclubs and television started their careers in the Catskills and still are booked into Catskill hotels throughout the year. Although the area started off as a summer resort, the leading Catskill hotels are now as busy during the winter. The terrain is good for skiing, and when the weather fails, snow machines don't.

If you follow the Hudson Valley north of West Point and cross the river, you'll find the Franklin D. Roosevelt home and grave, a National Historical Site, at Hyde Park. North of Albany is Saratoga Springs, one of the most elegant resorts of the nineteenth century, and still a very pleasant and interesting place to visit. There's the famous race track and a trotting course, a racing museum, a state historical park on the site of the Revolutionary War battle of Saratoga, a mineral spa, and a fine old hotel, the Gideon Putnam.