Thursday, June 21, 2012

Upstate NY

This past weekend we took the train about an hour upstate to Sleepy Hollow to tour the Rockefeller estate. The house is called Kykuit which means something like "lookout" in Dutch. Its perched way up above the town and has amazing views!
If you stand in the center of the house you can see all the way through on both sides, its kind of fantastic. The Rockefeller family has an insane art collection but I was more excited by the architecture :)
Below is the view from the front door. We arrived in the driveway and it was like a little piece of heaven for me; a gorgeous view, fountains with the sound of running water, and greenery everywhere!!!
And it got even better when we go to the back of the house, the best view yet, overlooking the Hudson River. Its like a painting!
The house was insane inside but we weren't allowed to take pictures. We were allowed to take pictures in the carriage house though. It currently houses some of the old carriages and then a mini car museum.
One of the carriages was specifically for Winthrop Rockefeller, who was governor of Arkansas. I told our tour guide where we were originally from and she got excited because she had never met anyone from Arkansas :)

We also did a little exploring in Sleepy Hollow. Below is a picture of an old farm house that has been preserved.
We checked out the Sleepy Hollow cemetery and saw Washington Irving's grave site. There are apparently quite a few famous people buried here but for the most part we just walked around and enjoyed the quiet :)
 

Sunday, June 17, 2012

DC Wedding

I'm a little behind on my blog so here's a little catching up....
About a month ago John and I went to DC for a friend's wedding. We took the bus again and didn't really have the smoothest trip there or back to the city but the time we were in DC was really fun. We actually missed the bus twice! Long story but it ended up being fine :)
The wedding was beautiful and had really great food and music. Clearly we had lots of fun in the photo booth they had at the wedding too!
The wedding was at a hotel in DC which happened to be on Pennsylvania Avenue so afterwards we took a stroll by the White House. I had never actually seen the White House in real life so that was pretty cool :)