Tag: Wine

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At Home in the Garden State

When you travel and you are from New Jersey, a familiar feeling arises when someone asks you where you are from – which is that of dread. This is actually a little disheartening considering that New Jersey isn’t a half bad state at all – we have brilliant beaches, intoxicating cities, and quaint suburbs. However, one thing that non-Jerseyans are often surprised to hear (and normally don’t believe anyway, even though it’s on our license plates) is that New Jersey is a true garden state. We are surrounded by rolling hills and colossal forests that make for great weekend getaways when the city becomes too much to bear. Now that spring is on its way, take the plunge and visit some of these green destinations. Drive over to Jersey. I promise you won’t end up in the Hudson.

1. Hot air balloon over the hills. Hot air ballooning is pricey, but it’s a pretty cool way to glaze over the green Jersey landscape (even if you can only afford to do it once). Hitting between 500 and 2500 feet and lasting around an hour, you can take a look at the reservoirs, mountainsides, and even nearby New York City from your balloon. Per passenger, you can pay $215 at Balloons Aloft located in Pittstown, about a half an hour southeast from Easton, Pennsylvania.

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 Image courtesy of USA Hot Air

2. Tube down the Delaware River. Get off the ground for a little bit by renting a tube, kayak, or canoe and sift on through the Delaware for an afternoon. You won’t have to be bogged by a guide and you can get out and swim (or sleep in the boat) as much as you like. It’s a pretty easy go too – no need to worry about trying to fight down some rapids. For between $26 and $51 per rider for a five to six mile trip (anywhere between 2.5 to four hours depending on your rental), you can visit Delaware River Tubing in Frenchtown, about 35 minutes southeast of Easton, Pennsylvania.

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 Image courtesy of NJ.com

3. Rent a cabin for non-camping. I don’t know about you, but my idea of camping is hanging out at the Hilton down the street with no pool access. However, there are alternatives. If you want to hang by the forest but aren’t too keen on sleeping in a tent (umm, there are animals and stuff out there) then consider renting a cabin, preferably one near actual stuff to do (and a pool). Check out the Countryside Cottages in Bartonsville, Pennsylvania which you can rent from $200 a night and stay close to the Tannersville Outlets, American Candle, tons of casinos, and Camelback Mountain Resort.

4. Horseback ride through the West. The West of New Jersey, that is. A great way to revamp your hiking habits is to ride a horse instead and get in touch with nature without ever having to touch the ground. For $40 for an hour ride and $180 for a day-long ride at Top View Riding Ranch, you can trek through the Paulinskill Trail and ramble through the river in Blairstown, about 25 minutes east of Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania.

5. Drink fine wines. New Jersey is literally littered with wineries, which isn’t particularly shocking considering the drinks we must consume to deal with the taxes in this state. Wineries are an awesome way to spend some time outside, drink something besides Barefoot, and eat some cheese. At Beneduce Vineyards in Pittstown, you pay $10 to sample several wines alongside cheeses and meats, get a glass to take home, and cruise the vineyard itself in a golf cart afterwards – unsupervised.

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6. Dance with wolves. Zoos not really your thing? It’s cool. Check out the Lakota Wolf Preserve in Columbia, about 15 minutes southeast of East Stroudsberg, and get on a guided tour for $15 for an hour and a half to see and learn about four different packs of wolves. At the Preserve, you can also do a 1/2 mile hike or hang out in the observation area.

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 Image courtesy of Lakota Wolf Preserve

7. Zipline down the mountainside. If the amusement park is a bit of a hike for you this weekend, consider taking your thrills to the skies by ziplining this great state and getting some awesome views of the mountains and countryside. For $65 a person, hit the Mountain Creek Zipline Tour in Vernon (one hour from Paramus) with ziplines ranging from 200 feet to 1500 feet suspended above a mountaintop lake.

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 Image courtesy of Advertiser News South

8. Take a hike (and skip the gym). Hiking is the easiest and cheapest way to get in touch with nature, especially in New Jersey, a state that is flooded with parks and trails that are tempting to get lost on. As Carrie’s crazy ex-boyfriend in Sex and the City once so eloquently stated, “Here’s a secret… hiking… is walking.” Anyway, you can find great hidden-away trails in most Jersey cities you happen to be in, however one favorite is Tourne County Park in Denville, about 15 minutes from Morristown. With 550 acres, a climb to the top of the park boasts phenomenal views of New York City in the distance.

9. Get on your old bike. Got a crappy old mountain bike? Bring it to your local park for a nice ride around and you won’t care when it gets dirty (or destroyed). Once again, parks run rampant in New Jersey, but a great spot for mountain biking is Schooley’s Mountain County Park in Long Valley (thirty minutes from Morristown) which you can tour for road bikes or mountain bikes around the lake, fields, and up the mountain itself for a spectacular view of the countryside below.

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 Image courtesy of Flickr User

10. Bring home dinner. If you’re looking for a relaxing afternoon hanging out by the lake with a beer in one hand and a fishing pole in the other, New Jersey is the place to be, loaded with lakes and filled with fish.  Lake Hopatcong in Hopatcong, near Jefferson and Sparta, is the largest freshwater lake in New Jersey and has tons of docking stations for boats, lakeside bars (check out the Jefferson House, a community favorite), and insane mansions to gander at as you attempt to catch dinner for the wife but end up stopping at ShopRite instead.

Article idea courtesy of Nick Hodgins

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How To Pass The Time In the Skies

If you’re reading this, it’s because you have a thirst for the world. You have a need to try the oddest looking foods, ravage the most dangerous cities, run from the scariest thieves, and see the most stunning sights. However, getting to these places costs a high price. And that price; besides giving up the security of a 9 to 5 job and a cushy salary and any semblance of a normal life, would be that you have to spend a lot of hours stuck in a boring airport, complete with recycled air and screaming babies and freeze-wrapped food.

Passing all of these hours in the airport isn’t easy. Finding things to entertain you takes real effort and it’s hard to give up so much time accomplishing nothing. However, I have some answers to your woes. Read below for ways to pass the time in productive ways at the airport and on the plane.

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1. Pick up some books on tape before you go. Since I have the work commute from Hell, I have been spending a lot of time at the library scoring books on tape. Reading Steve Jobs may be a little boring to actually flip through, but listening to it in the relaxing voice of whoever got paid to read that is much easier to get through and enjoy while you zone out on the airplane and fall into another world. Some that I have been particularly enjoying recently are America by Jon Stewart, Tough Shit by Kevin Smith, and Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore.

2. Read your guidebook. Before you’re blindly wandering around your next destination wondering where you can find a bathroom, read through a guidebook beforehand so you have a grasp on the secrets of the city, the top destinations, and the top restaurants to hit. The airplane, a hole of a place where there isn’t much else to do anyway, is a perfect time and place to get this done.

3. Download some podcasts. In realm with grabbing your books on tape, downloading podcasts is a cool way to listen to some of your favorite radio stations, find some new material, and generally expand your horizons besides listening to the same albums over and over again.

4. Write down your thoughts. Especially if you are embarking on a true journey such as visiting a new continent for the first time, studying abroad, traveling with a new person, or maybe roaming alone for the first time, writing is a great way to get your thoughts down so that one day when you’re a worn traveler, you can look back and remember how you felt before it all even started. Plus, since you’re gonna be jammed on that plane for awhile, you have all the time in the world so you aren’t rushed to get it all down on paper without really feeling it through.

5. Get drunk. On European flights, wine is generally given out as lax (and free) as soda is, even it tastes like toilet water. However, beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to getting a little free buzz pre-adventure. Plus you’re gonna need a confidence boost before going to try to pick up that guy in the seat in front of you.

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Wine Country, USA

Yesterday we enjoyed a relaxing, sunny afternoon in beautiful Wine Country, sipping on whites and reds while sampling fine cheeses before taking an outing through the vineyards lain across the rolling green hills without a care in the world. Tuscany, you may think? Maybe Napa Valley? Oh no. We were in scenic Pittstown, New Jersey, located in northwest Jersey just a little bit off of the beaten path.

At first, the idea of visiting a winery, a beloved and precious place that now makes me think of Italy in the way that tattered old photos make you think of your angelic passed dog, made me wonder if I could even take it, if I could enjoy a place that was so magnificent across the Atlantic but seemed like it could only be a cheap and sad imitation in the US of A. And to be honest, it actually wasn’t half bad.

Tuscany

Beneduce Vineyards was one of the few wineries in the area I was able to sniff out that wasn’t an obscene distance from my house in the Middle of Nowhere, New Jersey (only about 45 minutes away) and had a pretty down-to-earth deal concerning wine tastings and tours and such, because let’s be honest, you can’t drive that far just to gulp down some wine. Unlike many other wineries I was looking at, you didn’t need an appointment to come to a tasting or 11 other people or an extra $150 bucks.

Instead, for $10 and from 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm on Sundays, my boyfriend and I sampled a pretty humble amount of four different wines, which I guess I couldn’t complain about for $10.The girl at the desk who poured each wine for us had a pretty extensive knowledge about how each was made and bottled and the quirks and its appropriate pairings. Which was made even better because with the four wines, we received some meat and cheese, which we maybe sort of substituted for lunch that day. Whoops.

Beneduce Winery

After the wines and the free glasses we received with them and the food, for some odd reason, the workers at Beneduce Winery then handed us over some keys to their golf carts to cruise their winery on their own doing. They offer a tour by one of their own workers, but I think everyone felt the same way as we did (who needs a tour of a vineyard?) because as we were cruising around in a semi-drunken stupor (after figuring out how to drive the cart, which they don’t bother telling you about either) we saw many other yippity groups giving themselves tours (AKA going as fast as they could in a golf cart without running over any plants).

Cruisin

Mostly, the vineyard part is just a nice photo op, since without someone telling you about each one, the only info is a sign saying what kind of grape each plant is. It’s still fun to cruise around in a real live vineyard, and maybe stop at the hammock on the outskirts too for an afternoon nap. Hey, why not?

It may not be my beautiful Tuscany. It may not be France or Napa or any other places that house wine country. Jeez, it’s just New Jersey. But I think there is something to be said for finding gems in your own backyard. It doesn’t require a full wallet or a plane ticket or a pompous sense of what’s high class. All you need is a little research to see what’s hiding right before your very eyes.

Photo Ops

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The Wine Country

Florence is a beautiful place. It is bustling with Renaissance architecture, ancient museums, yellows and greens and grays. Siena, however, which is really only a short drive down the road (about an hour and a half, which is nothing compared to the 12 hour bus rides I’m used to) is not like this. I’m actually not totally sure why everyone told me that Siena has always been in competition with Florence.

Unlike Florence, Siena doesn’t really look very Renaissance-esque (but then again I’m not entirely sure what this would look like, besides having Florence as an example). Siena is a city of the Medieval, a place that looks like it would be best friends with Edinburgh, Scotland.

 

Siena is a little place, however, and there doesn’t seem to be a ton to see. Our Bus2Alps tour guide, Tiernan, took us to the city center, Piazza del Campo, which literally looks like a big stone field. This is also the site of where Il Palio takes place. After roaming up one of the city’s many hills (it overlooks the Tuscan countryside) we find the Duomo, which looks remarkably similar to my Duomo in Florence, although a little smaller. Apparently, this Duomo was on its way up to being bigger and better than mine, but then the Black Death came around and people had a lot better things to do than build ginormous churches.

After this short little tour of Siena, Bus2Alps took us to our next destination– a local winery called Tenuta Torciano. When I see all the pretty horses roaming about in their fields alongside the squares and squares of grapes, I know that we have come to the right place. We are led inside to a little house where a man who speaks very little English literally serves us eight glasses of wine each. And this isn’t the three euro wine that I find at the cheap grocery store down the street. I can taste the alcohol in this wine. But I’ll be damned if I have to spit it out before the next glass is served– I chug that wine down along with our meal of oily bread, salad, some kind of potato dish, lasagna, and biscotti.

The drunker we all get, the better friends we are. I make best friends with every person sitting within a five foot radius and I start to actually wonder if I’m going to vom on the bus and why I can’t see anything and it’s 1:00 pm. After we stumble out of the winery and the Italian man tries to sell us wine, we all wander the grounds for a little bit, running in and out of willow trees and playing with the geese and ducks that hang around in the sunshine.

We all shuffle back on the bus and I’m still not sobering up. What a surprise. Our bus tries to crawl up the hills, but it seems we have a lack of oil, so Tiernan, our guide, and the owner of Bus2Alps have us come outside and we begin to walk to San Gimignano. If I was sober, I may or may not be frustrated by this. But instead, I am PSYCHED, as everyone else seems to be. We run up and down the ninety degree roads and take pictures, our sobriety coming back in the sunshine. It is a beautiful day for a bus to break down, let me tell you that.

Finally we get to San Gimignano, which is another medieval city similar to Siena. We climb up some more hills to get to the wine museum/castle and we take dopey pictures as the Bus2Alps crew buys us more wine from the museum, which we sip overlooking the countryside.

Back down at the main square, we eat gelato, which is supposedly the best in the world (I think Florence’s is better). As we eat our gelato next to the fountain in the center, it begins to pour and pour and pour. I wonder if anyone even noticed.