Pure Mountain Olive Oils and Vinegars in Rhinebeck, N.Y., is a lovely place to buy a $17.99 bottle of basil olive oil, should that fit your budget. But it's also a lovely place to try some free, as I did on a recent visit, dousing a cube of cheese and grape tomato — a modified caprese salad on a toothpick. Also: a piece of crispy baguette toast or three slathered with asparagus pesto. And dozens more olive oils to sample solo (tasting instructions provided) or with chunks of bread. Was I overindulging? Apparently not.
"Just go right down and try as many as you can," said the employee, pointing to a row of stainless steel olive oil dispensers. Don't mind if I do.
The midafternoon mini-meal (dessert was free, sizable samples of Annandale Almonds bars from nearby Oliver Kita Chocolatier) was just one of the bargains I found during an affordable weekend for two in Dutchess County, about 90 minutes by car from New York City in the Hudson River Valley. It's even closer from much of northern New Jersey and Fairfield County, Conn.
With my friend Caroline Gonzalez reprising her role as stand-in girlfriend, to make sure this was indeed a true test of a couple's weekend (no sleeping in the car or subsisting solely on Cheetos), I put together an itinerary. The final cost: almost exactly $200, including gas, lodging, food and activities. Not bad, considering many couples I know spend more than that without ever leaving the city.
Lodging was the biggest challenge. To cut costs in half, we stayed home Friday night and left early Saturday — it's not like we were headed upstate for the night life. Our original plan to stay at the two-room Costello's Guest House in Hyde Park, the town that is home to the Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites, was thwarted when the owner, Patsy Costello, told me she wouldn't be hosting guests: she was working at the Regina Coeli Parish Arts & Crafts Fair on Saturday afternoon and had to fill in as organist at a hospital chapel in Poughkeepsie Sunday morning.
But she gave me the number of Dot Chenevert, a retired florist who in October opened the Greener Oak Guest House (thegreeneroakguesthouse.com) at her Hyde Park home. Ms. Chenevert, whose name is French for "green oak," cheerily told me both of her two rooms were available. I reserved the smaller one, $75 plus tax, figuring if no one took the other one, we'd be upgraded. We were, to a spacious room painted sage green (by her husband, Paul, who renovated the wing for guests), as well as a sitting area, coffee machine, television and fresh flowers. Dot's years as small-town florist had imbued her with the perfect demeanor for hosting, and I made a note to favor innkeepers who were ex-florists over, say, ex-morticians, on future trips.
We arrived in the area midmorning, and immediately headed out on a self-devised tour of the area's farm stores (ending with that mini-lunch in Rhinebeck). At Fishkill Farms, we bought a carton of pint-size, red-blushed Seckel pears left over from the fall harvest, about two pounds for $5, along with a half-gallon of apple cider and fluffy, greaseless $1 cider doughnuts. Then we went to Sprout Creek Farm for a free and personalized sampling of their cheeses (we tried all six, creamy and crumbly, smooth and sharp, cow and goat) and Caroline persuaded me to buy a $7 wedge of a firm, bold-flavored cow's milk cheese called Bogart. Then we walked around to visit the animals, as the farm encourages. A gang of turkeys ruffled up their feathers as we arrived, as if we were their biggest threat during this pre-Thanksgiving week.
Our final farm stop was Barton Orchards Farm Market and Bakery (bartonorchards.com/farmstore.cfm), where the stress is on bakery. "I want 12 of whatever I smell right now," I demanded of a startled young worker who thought I was asking a serious question. It turns out I was. We tracked down the doughy, sweet scent to a tray full of "apple dumplings," $1.25 pillowy pastries filled with apple filling still almost too hot to eat.
After a late-afternoon visit to the very crafts fair Ms. Costello was working (arriving toward the end, we escaped the $2 entrance fee), we drove up to Bard College near the northern border of the county. In the past, I've found lots of free stuff at colleges, and Bard was no exception.
We started at the well-respected Hessel Museum of Art, where we caught the tail end of an exhibition by the Israeli-born artist Haim Steinback, whose best-known work is of found objects arranged on shelves — much more provocative than it sounds. We also stopped by Bard's Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center to gawk and take bad pictures, then hit a free evening concert featuring the young and accomplished opera singer Rebecca Ringle, which I had spotted on the college's online calendar and had struck me as the perfect event to falsely convince readers of my interest in high culture.
In between we stopped at the Me Oh My Café and Pie Shop (meohmypieshop.com) in nearby Red Hook for dinner, a break from our farm-fresh diet. (Doughnuts count as farm-fresh if fried on a farm, right?) Last year, the shop — which has an 18-seat restaurant pleasantly tucked into the side of their baked goods display — started offering legit $10 dinners.
By legit I mean both tasty and sizable. I got two slabs of old-fashioned meatloaf with sides of corn pudding and squash; Caroline, the pasta with cremini mushrooms and Madeira cream sauce. Afterward, we were so stuffed, we couldn't even eat a piece of pie. I was distraught, but Caroline suggested we buy a (huge) $4.25 slice of pear-and-sour-cream pie to save for breakfast. My hero.
The next morning, we gathered all our foodstuffs together by the coffee maker: pie, a leftover doughnut, an extra apple dumpling, the remaining pears, some Clementine oranges Dot had put out, and the remainder of the cheese. It all made for an indulgent breakfast buffet.
Bellies full, we headed out to explore more of the area's cultural riches. The three sites run by the National Park Service in Hyde Park are not cheap — the F.D.R. home and presidential library is $18 and both the Eleanor Roosevelt's Val-Kill Cottage retreat and the Vanderbilt Mansion are $10. But all offer free open houses in December — decorated for Christmas — and for both Roosevelt sites that means this Saturday. Alas, I had to fork over $20 to visit the country mansion where Frederick W. and Louise Vanderbilt spent portions of the fall and spring in the early 20th century. (They summered in Newport, naturally.) To the modern eye, the place looks like a somewhat absurd attempt to recreate a European palace, but our excellent guide, who called himself Ranger Andy, explained that back in the Gilded Age such ostentation was the height of fashion.
Though the temperature had dipped into the 20s, Caroline and I decided (O.K., I forced her) to bundle up and visit one of the Hudson Valley's most popular attractions: the railroad bridge turned pedestrian park that runs 1.28 miles from Poughkeepsie to Highland, N.Y. It's named Walkway Over the Hudson, though in our case it was more Walkway Almost to the Hudson: as we approached the riverbank from high above, we were driven back by an Ice Age wind chill that would have forced a woolly mammoth to put on a sweater. I have no doubt it's a great summer attraction.
We ended the afternoon with a stroll down Main Street in Beacon — the town The Times called "Williamsburg on the Hudson" — stopping in some galleries and, just to tide us over for the ride home, splitting an $8.50 burger salad at Poppy's Burgers and Fries (poppyburger.com) — featuring beef from grass-fed local cows, of course. On a chilly Sunday, the town was a little quiet, but every second Saturday, things are far more lively as the galleries and businesses stay open into the evening — yet another free event to keep costs down on a winter escape from the city.
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