Out of Town: 13 Summer Weekend Trips Within Five Hours of New York City |
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Out of Town: 13 Summer Weekend Trips Within Five Hours of New York City
The best drive-and-rail escapes worth clearing a Friday for, from the marquee stalwarts to the coves and hill towns the regulars keep for themselves.
By the second week of a New York summer, the city splits into two kinds of people: the ones who've already plotted their Friday escape and the ones still pretending they haven't. Both know that the city is most lovable from a distance of about two hours—far enough that the heat and the horns become someone else's problem, close enough to be back by Monday. Blame it on your average July afternoon in the city—the office window framing a sky too good to waste, the group chat lighting up with somebody's grainy photo of a porch and a body of water. This year, the restlessness has company: the World Cup has commandeered the five boroughs, flag capes on the L train and a Sunnyside dive gone briefly fluent in Croatian, and the whole place is throwing a party it can't quite believe is real. Stay for a match or two. Then go.
Luckily, deliverance doesn't require a boarding pass. Within five hours of Manhattan—by car when the LIE shows mercy, by rail when it doesn't—lies a startling sweep of coastline and countryside, Gilded Age bombast and barefoot chill. A few of these places still feign undiscovered. Others have been laundering old money since before the Vanderbilts broke ground on their "cottages." They're arranged here on purpose, sleeper to stalwart, so the escape velocity is yours to choose. Let the city keep its World Cup. The 9:48 to anywhere is boarding, and the rest of the summer waits at the other end of the line.
Best Weekend Trips from NYC
The North Fork, New York
The Brandywine Valley, Pennsylvania
Block Island, Rhode Island
The Western Catskills, New York
Bucks County, Pennsylvania
Litchfield County, Connecticut
The Berkshires, Massachusetts
Hudson Valley, New York
Newport, Rhode Island
The Hamptons, New York
The Amtrak Northeast Regional sets you in Mystic in 2 hours and 43 minutes, a 10-minute walk from a downtown built around a working drawbridge. The seaport postcard still holds—schooners, chowder, a maritime museum where you can board a 19th-century whaling ship—but the 2026 story is the food. David Standridge, who cooks tide-to-table at the Shipwright's Daughter, followed his 2024 James Beard win with a 2026 Outstanding Chef finalist nod, plating the sugar kelp and sea robin most kitchens throw back. The town caught up to him this year: the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival lines the riverbanks August 8 and 9, and the Seaport Museum is showing sunken ships rebuilt in LEGO through New Years. The Shipwright's Daughter sits inside The Whaler's Inn, the village's surest bet, which folded in the Stanton House in 2025—10 suites with gas fireplaces and decks angled at the Bascule Bridge. Newer still is Delamar Mystic, with 31 rooms along the river hung with a shipping heir's collection of marine paintings, its seafood room La Plage helmed by chef Frederic Kieffer.
Everyone defects to Hudson. The antiques dealers, the gallerists, the weekenders pricing brownstones over natural wine—they all wash up on Warren Street, leaving the town directly across the river to mind its own business. That town is Catskill, the seat of Greene County, and it has spent the last few years turning its own neglect into the best contemporary-art address north of the city. The engine is Foreland, an 85,000-square-foot campus stitched from three 19th-century mill buildings on Catskill Creek—31 artist studios and four galleries where a paper mill used to grind, founded by the artist Stef Halmos, who bought the dormant brick piles in 2017 and let the work fill them. This June, the international Gaa Gallery, until now a Provincetown-and-Cologne operation, opened a Catskill outpost there. The Empire Service reaches Hudson in about two hours, and Catskill sits eight miles across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge—a car earns its keep in the mountains, but the village walks. For the stay, point it toward Camptown in nearby Leeds, a 1968 motor lodge made over into 24 rooms and 26 log cabins across 22 wooded acres, with its Mexican kitchen, Casa Susanna, run by chef Efrén Hernández, a 2025 James Beard semifinalist. In town, dinner is Phos, the Greek-American room chef Stephanie Skiadas opened on Main Street last June, where the grilled octopus has been humbling the Hudson crowd that bothered to cross the bridge. Time it to Upstate Art Weekend, June 25 through 29, when the studios throw their doors........