Fort for the day

Just when you're thinking you've seen everything and been everywhere there is to go within an hour of home, you realise that just a 45 minute drive away there are interesting places you never even knew about.

Schoharie County is west of us.  It's not that I don't know it at all (in fact I was there with Dad just over a week ago, at the Landis Arboretum), but I don't know a lot of it.  Today we took a scenic drive to the Old Stone Fort.

This museum was once a church, which was fortified during the Revolutionary War.  The exhibits inside are largely military, though upstairs there's an eclectic mix, seemingly of anything anyone local has ever donated.  Antique toys and lace and buttons, assorted items from the Philippines, decorative wreaths made from human hair (impressive, in a eeuw kind of way), a replica dinosaur egg.  The kids might have just whisked through quickly, but fortunately there was a scavenger hunt for them to complete which encouraged them to give the whole collection a bit more of their attention.  The nice period-costumed ladies in the gift shop downstairs even offered them prizes for having found everything. 

In addition to the main museum, there are several other buildings to explore, including a one-roomed schoolhouse with slates for you to practise writing on, a fine old Dutch barn, and a house containing examples of early recording and broadcasting equipment.  A little further down the road there's a covered bridge - built, because someone thought that would be fun, in about 1982.

Ten minutes more in the car and we arrived at Vroman's Nose, Middleburgh.  A short but very steep wooded hike leads to a promontory that gives a grand, sweeping view of a wide section of the Schoharie Valley.  It was overcast today so the colours of the fields were muted, but it was all very impressive and lovely.   There are sheer drops off the top, and no barriers, so it's not somewhere I'd want to take an untamed toddler (I was nervous enough supervising a nine year old in a silly mood), but it felt satisfyingly adventurous.

All in all it was a very enjoyable afternoon.  Even our kids, who (typically) had expressed reluctance about going on a family outing admitted afterwards (as usual) that they'd had a fun time.