The other destination, especially for those wanting a good dinner out and a stroll among shops (rather than stocking up on JiffyPop and cupcakes), was Woodstock. On the way into Woodstock from Route 28 one passed through Bearsville, where my all-time favorite day-off dining experience could be had at the Little Bear Cafe. (For a while Little Bear featured very fresh - no MSG - "alternative" Chinese cuisine. The cold sesame noodles were the best.) Rudi's was there, at Big Indian (now Peekamoose, a fine restaurant), and for a few years in the mid-70s there was Isolde's, a cheap and fairly good German restaurant where you could get a tasty veal dish with thick Bavarian noodles and an extremely tall glass of Czech beer.
Some of us turned left at Route 28 at Big Indian, and went up to Margaretville to the north. Cass Inn served great home-made soup, I recall. A number of year-round staffers over the years have come to us from Margaretville and it strikes me that it's a haven for a certain class of enviro-minded post-urban intellectuals, craftspeople and dreamers of the perfect mom-'n-pop shop.
Nowadays the staff especially loves to go to Phoenicia. Some years ago a little cafe called Sweet Sue's opened (I'm guessing in the 80s - it's been around) - good, fresh food, excellent brunch. In recent summers some of my favorite between-sessions Sunday mornings have happened on the front porch of Sweet Sue's, a spinach omelette in front of me and an A+ cup of cappucino, and the warmth of the morning sun on my back.Yes, Phoenicia has a case of the cutes. Adorable downtown, the mountains peeking in from just beyond the edge of town. The rush of the Esopus River can be heard on the north end of the main street.
There are some local-color mountain equipment stores, which you have to browse while you're licking your ice cream cone from the parlor on the south end of the street. Last summer my Hannah saw a pair of beaded mocassins she really wanted, and I was in such a good mood that I bought them for her. I never thought they would last, and doubted she really liked them. One of those happy-now purchases that one gives into. But she loves them and wears them at least every other day while at camp. They're Catskills cool.I love this part of the world. It's real natural, not fake natural. The amenities evolve and they have some relationship to the way things are going economically and socially. The day off for me always meant not getting away so much as the chance to explore where I really was in its context.
The sign outside a shop in the middle of the main street poetically says
the tender land
HOME
It's like a slice of a haiku, saying in four words what it took me a whole longish blog entry to say.
