Photo: Rhododendrites , CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Every week, someone books a hotel "in New York" that turns out to be a shuttle ride from an airport runway, and their whole trip inherits the mistake. Where you sleep in this city shapes everything: what you see out the window, where you eat breakfast, how much of your vacation you spend underground on the subway. The good news is that there's no single right answer — there's a right answer for you. Let's find it. First trip? Stay central, but not that central Midtown makes sense for first-timers: you can walk to Times Square, Broadway theaters, Rockefeller Center, and Central Park, and every train line in creation passes underneath. The trade-off is soul. Much of Midtown empties after office hours and the blocks immediately around Times Square never stop being Times Square. My compromise pick: stay south of the chaos, in the 20s and 30s — NoMad, Flatiron, Chelsea. You're fifteen minutes from ev...
Photo via Unsplash As much as we love New York City, sometimes the best thing you can do is leave it — just for a day. The beauty of NYC is that you're a short train or bus ride from beaches, mountains, historic towns, vineyards, and some genuinely stunning scenery. You can swap skyscrapers for forests and be back in time for dinner. Whether you're a visitor wanting a change of pace or a local craving some green, here are the best day trips you can pull off without a car (mostly) and without a ton of planning. The Hudson Valley: Scenery and Small Towns Head up the Hudson River and the landscape opens into rolling hills, riverside towns, hiking trails, and some of the prettiest scenery in the Northeast — especially in autumn, when the foliage is unreal. The Metro-North Hudson Line makes it easy: Beacon is the art-lover's stop, home to Dia Beacon's vast contemporary galleries, while Cold Spring is a postcard village of antique shops and the trailhead for the popular ...