Over this past Labor Day weekend I had the pleasure of spending it with some friends at a lovely lake house in New York. This place was absolutely breathtaking. The night we got there I sat on the dock and looked up at the night sky, drinking in all the stars. There was a fine mist on the water and I felt like I was in an amazing dream. When I woke up the first morning, I went down to the dock and took this photo:
Beautiful, no? The weather was generally nice even if it did get cold at night. We had lots of sunshine and laughs and overall it was a great time. The only bad thing for me was that I had just come back from a vacation and didn't really need any rest, so I was a little antsy. When Sunday afternoon rolled around, a few of us decided that we needed to get out for a bit. After some poking around on my GPS, we decided to hit the Woodstock Museum in Bethel Hill, New York.
I was really excited to check it out because I had grown up with a lot of music from that era. When we were kids my father would always play Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Santana; Credence Clearwater Revival and many others. I have lots of fond memories of rides for ice cream and to Harveys Lake for some Grotto Pizza all set to a sixties soundtrack.
On our way to the museum, we stumbled upon the local Harvest Festival. It was a mixture of arts, crafts, live music and food. There was also an alpaca festival going on so we got to check out some of the lovely clothing made from their wool. The place was jammed and it made me happy because I really like to see local people supporting their community and the arts.
After we hung out there for a while, we headed over to the museum. For some reason I thought the museum was going to be a hole in the wall, but the site is actually a very big place. Check it out here: http://www.bethelwoodscenter.org/. The museum itself is curated incredibly well; it had all kinds of clothing, albums, tickets and maps that the police used to try to control the crowd of 500,000 who poured into the tiny town of Bethel Hill.
It was cool to see how they used the technology of the 21st century to try to recreate the sixties vibe. They had a Volkswagen bus that you could sit in, which is cool, but what was even more awesome was that the windshield was actually a video screen that showed a short about how people traveled to Woodstock. There was an iMax theater with bean bag chairs that was meant to give the viewer the sense of what it was like to be in the crowd over those three days. They also had some videoes that explained the culture at that time, and they were pretty interesting.
Unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed in the museum, and I didn't get a chance to take pictures of any of the grounds, but I can tell you that it was awe inspiring and breath taking. The museum is super cheap to get in, and even if it were more expensive it's totally worth the trip. I'm already making plans to return because I feel like there's so much more to see.
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