November 06, 2005

Day Trip to Storm King

After all the fun Meredith and I had our bowling date, I decided to step my woo-ment up a notch and decided to take Meredith on a roadtrip date! So we rented a car (er, actually - Meredith had to rent the car because I'd let my driver's license expire by accident. Doh!) and decided to check out the Storm King Art Center - a sprawling park filled with MASSIVE sculptures that's about an hour or so north of NYC.

meredith — Mer behind the wheel of our mighty rental. (Trying to hide how nervous she was about driving for the first time in a couple of years).

The NY Throughway is gorgeous in the fall.

A little over an hour later, and we'd arrived.

We picked a perfect fall day and the colors were out in full effect.

meredith — OMG! Giant art!

The grounds are amazing. There are all these sloping, manicured hills with giant sculptures every couple of hundred yards.

meredith — Look out! Falling art!

Hahaha. We're so lame.

Seriously, who's more retarded than us?

Good art!

Bad art!

meredith — Hahah. Using art as a prop to make new art.

Neato sculpture.

On the other side of the art center are a bunch of enormous crane-like sculptures that are made out of steel i-beams. This one must have been like 4 storeys tall!

More of the crane sculptures.

me, meredith — We laid underneath them and took a break.

And took pics.

This one is pretty famous. It's by Mark di Suvero and it's called Mother Peace.

It was created in 1969 during the summer of love.

meredith — Here's Mer experiencing the summer lovin'.

And here's me with my hippy-hair.

me, meredith — Awwww.

meredith — Even further across the park, are some interactive sculptures! This piece had a bunch of heavy rubber-mallets laying all over the place and could use them to wack the sculpture in different places and it would resonate in all sorts of weird ways. It was really neat.

meredith — And then a few other of the sculptures had bells that you could ring with pull-strings.

Who knew ringing a bell could be so fun?

meredith — Or so loud.

LOUD!

Can you spot camoflaged-me? (Look carefully).

meredith — The water fountains at Storm King had the most impressive water pressure I'd ever seen.

meredith — No matter how much you wanted a drink, you pretty much got your face washed instead.

meredith — This is a huge sculpture made out of rock! How insane is that?

Hey, that's my ear.

It took us about three and a half hours to tour the whole grounds and check everything out. If you're looking for a fun day trip from NYC, I highly recommend it. After we'd finished exploring, we just sat on the hill for a while people watching and waiting for the sun to go down.

me, meredith — Then we took this picture!

meredith — And on the way home we stopped at this really cute little Italian restaurant that was in the middle of nowhere! The end!