Saugerties...My New Fave Little Town in the Catskills

Ok, I'm sharing this info with all y'all cause I love you. But if all you btchz go up to Saugerties next weekend and buy houses and jack up the price of real estate I'm gonna be PISSED. Except that then we'd all live close to each other and that would be so much fun, and we could go antiqu-ing-n-shit, cause I SOOOOO WANNA BUY A HOUSE UP THERE TOO!

This weekend, Greg and I rented a kickass house right outside of Woodstock with our friends Kevin-n-Carmen.

We drove up on Friday night, hung out and played board games, built fires, got drunk, went out for delicious food, and basically just had fun and relaxed all weekend long.

Only, I kinda didn't want to come back home.

Here's a vid Greg made of our trip (you can also see way more at his site 30 Second Life):

I'm totally in love with the Catskills. It's literally just a 90 minute drive from NYC (a little longer for us cause we're comin from Brooklyn), but yet it's a world away from city life. In particular, I really love Ulster County. We used to live in Woodstock when I was a little kid (in fact I went here for Nursery School: The School of the New Moon), and so that town def has a special place in my heart. But now Woodstock is kind of overpriced and touristy and pretty much just the Tribeca of the Catskills---everything is more expensive just cause its in Woodstock. There are a bunch of rad little towns right around Woodstock, though, and this weekend, I discovered Saugerties...and Phoenecia. Needless to say, it was kinda love at first site.

On Sat morn we went to Sweet Sue's in Phoenecia for breakfast. Let's just say this place is *actually* worth the 2.5 hour ride from NYC just to get breakfast. The pancakes are an other worldly experience...they are crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, and bigger than your face. Like they are GIGANTIC. And yet you just can't stop eating them. They also make these amazing muffins there, and delicious cookies as well. On weekends, you will often wait up to an hour to get a table at this joint, but trust me when I say: IT'S SO FUCKING WORTH IT. If you go up to this area and you don't go to Sweet Sue's, I basically don't ever want to talk to you again.

Phoenecia is a cute little town, but the town itself is pretty much one street. There are some vintage shops, a deli, a cute home store and this bizarro pharmacy. Like there is shit in this place from 1976. There's dust on boxes, and magazines are faded and you almost feel like Michael J. Fox is gonna come around the aisle and tell you it's time to get back into the DeLorean and get your ass back to the future.

But the drive there from Woodstock is fab...you drive along this windy, tree lined road next to a beautiful stream and basically just think about how dirty and shitty NYC looks in comparison.

That red house above is the house we stayed in in Woodstock! Isn't it adorbs!? We found it on homeaway.com, which is a great resource for searching for vacation rental properties all over the world. We've used both homeaway and vrbo.com (vacation rental by owner) and have been happy with both sites.

In addition to just being a great house (2 bdr, 2 bath), it had this killer sauna hut. Like you could go out, get the fire going in the Sauna Hut and then relax in there for as long as you wanted. Only hitch was, it was friggin freezing out...so getting yourself from the house to the Sauna Hut was no small feat. Disappointingly, none of us managed to brave that shit. But we had a fire going the entire time in the wood burning stove inside (sidenote: I'm obsessed with the smell of fires...I'm so bummed we don't have a fireplace in our apt), and didn't turn on the TV once (MAJOR accomplishment pour moi).

We stopped in at a barn estate sale that we passed on the highway, and searched around through all the fab junk. Greg found an old pornographic view finder and I got a whole lot of like 50 old scarves/hankies for $15 that I'll probably use for gift wrap purposes.

We did a bit more exploring on Sat and ended up at The Red Onion for dinner in Saugerties. ZOMG, the food was AH-mazing. It's hard not to become a pompous asshole when you live in pretty much the best city in the country for food consumption, but I just sort of always expect for shit to not be as good when we go to other places. But honestly, everywhere we went was totally on par with NYC restaurants.

We ended up at Love Bites, also in Saugerties, on Sunday morn for bkfst and it was also so dee-lish. On Sat night, we didn't get to see much of Saugerties because Red Onion is sort of more on the outskirts of town, but on Sun we got the full Monty. And there were some adorable, amazing little shops!

Lucky Chocolates was the bomb diggity...they put all of your chocolatey purchase in these cute little boxes with stickers on them that say "you just got lucky." So brillz!

image via Amaretto girl (click photo for link)There were also a slew of killer antique/vintage furniture shops. My fave was Green on Partition Street. They had the most amazing collection of well-priced mid-century modern furniture. There was so much good shit there, my head felt like it was gonna explode. I wanted to buy like 17 different things.

I also really loved The Saugerties Antiques Gallery. In an a gigantic display of what a shitty blogger I am, I didn't get the name of any of the other shops that we checked out. But srsly, ppl...they all ruled. I easily could have spent the whole day browsing.

So, yeah: now, more than ever, I'm obsessed with buying a house up there.

Le sigh.

Places I'd love to visit the next time we're up in the Catskills:

+ Stan the Junk man at Zaborski Emporium in Kingston

+ Fleisher's Organic Meats

+ Opus 40

+ Snow tubing on Hunter Mountain

+ The Bear Cafe (been there many times, and it's PHENOM)