Wanted a haircut before heading up to the Hudson Valley next weekend, so we decided to spend the day taking a drive up to (and past) Princeton, look at some fall foliage, then loop back and get the haircut after it got a little dark.
Got our usual bagel and hit the road — very pleasant morning drive. We got to Allentown and evidently there was some kind of local festival taking up the main street, so we had to detour around it. (The Moth is closed on Sundays so we knew we weren’t stopping, so it was no big deal.) Eventually made it into Princeton and then headed to Lambertville to get a coffee and see if we could find this small canal-side road I had found a couple years ago (and we keep trying to retrace back to). Got coffee at Luminary — sadly no pastries — and then continued up along the river through Stockton, just to see what we saw.
Eventually we got to another detour — this one because a bridge across a fairly solid tributary was out — and this detour took us all over the place. We eventually made it out to Milford and I steered us towards a cider farm that I had found online — Ironbound.
We got a sampler of ciders and some food (it was well past lunchtime by this point, and we had not realized how hungry we were), ultimately got dessert and another round of ciders, got a little sample of their fortified “calvados-y” cider, and then took even another round out into the outdoor pavilion to sit and enjoy the autumn leaves out around the farm. H managed to interject herself into the conversation of the young couple next to us, and we finished off our last cider with a nice chat with them about traveling, the digital nomad experience, local things to check out (they were from the area), things to check out around LBI, all in all some good evidence that the kids are all right, as they say. Finished off the afternoon by grabbing some bottles (including one pet-nat bottle to open for our anniversary).
We headed back to Lambertville to check out the Halloween decorations closer to evening. I don’t think we knew that the town went all out and that numerous houses put on full-front-yard displays, and I don’t mean in the “load all the inflatables you can buy under the two giant skeletons” kind of all-out …
Might be in a video coming some day.
Between the extended visit to the cider farm and stopping to enjoy these guys at night, we didn’t make it back to Princeton before the barbers closed up, so that still is on the “to do” list. Worth it!