Since it didn't rain the whole time we were in the Hudson River Valley, we still got to go for a short hike. Well, I don't know if it was actually a hike, because the path was called "Poet's Walk," and it was pretty mild, but at the end you get to be on top of a hill and have a pretty view of the river:
They had to idiot-proof the trail by adding signs indicating you shouldn't wander through random open fields:
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| We wanted to take a picture of Ben walking past the sign barefoot, having left his shoes at its base to comply with the "No Bootprints" rule, but the ground was too muddy. |
Also, we saw a beaver:
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| It ran away before I could get a more impressive picture. |
After our beaver encounter it started to drizzle, so we decided to learn something and go to visit the
Historic Vanderbilt Mansion nearby.
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| This was just for one Vanderbilt and his wife, and they only lived there 8 weeks a year. |
We learned a lot of interesting things about the Vanderbilt family, including that in his heyday Cornelius Vanderbilt owned one dollar out of every circulating twenty (compared to Bill Gates's 1:157 ratio today), and was worth more than the entire United States. Also, he had 12 kids when he died, but he left 95% to just one son, because of the other eleven ten were girls and the only other son was epileptic (i.e. "insane" in that day and age).
The mansion we visited was owned by Frederick William Vanderbilt, whose dad was the second-generation Vanderbilt who got 95% of his father's fortune. He and his wife never had any kids, which is why their mansion went to the park service after he died. Also, since it is near one of FDR's homes, during the '30s and '40s the CIA and secret service had a bunch of guys living in it for president-protecting purposes, and they drank all the wine out of the wine cellars (plural because there was one for whites, one for reds, and one for champagnes). What a sweet service assignment for World War Two!
They had a small museum next to the house, which included a section on the 60ish staff required to maintain the mansion and surrounding estate:
The two lonely dudes in the bottom right corner have somewhat cryptic labels:
So that's how I ended up spending the remainder of my vacation silently singing "you're a master of karate and friendship for everyone" to myself.
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