My brother Doug, known to his friends as “Douggie Fresh” for
reasons I do not know, is an avid skier who rented a share in a ski house at Killington,
Vermont for several years and then rented out the house for the winter season
last year . This year the house came up for sale and Douggie Fresh and his wife
Aviva decided to buy it. Go Douggie Fresh! 
Doug named the house Sasquatch Lodge. Sasquatch is technically ski-in,
ski-out, set on the lower flanks of the eastern side of mountain near a trail that
descends all the way to the lift besides Route 4 on the way to Woodstock.

Anyway, my bro gave me a key to Sasquatch Lodge when I saw
him in Boston a few weeks ago and invited me to use it. I considered waiting
until the fall foliage season in October, but after about two and a half more
weeks at my parents’ house in central New Jersey I decided there’s no better
time than the present. Why spend the hottest part of the summer in New Jersey
where temperatures are consistently in the high 80s to mid 90s when I could be
in the mountains in Vermont where average temps are more like the high 70s to
low 80s. It’s a no-brainer, right?

Douggie Fresh tells me I’ll be the first user of the house
since he purchased it . I suppose that’s quite an honor. I visited Sasquatch
Lodge once before for a week in February 2015 when it was so cold I barely got
out on my skis. I think a week or two in summer, though, will be nice to relax
and explore more of Vermont’s quaintness. I saw some of the state’s sights back
in 2012 on summer trips to New England but plan to spend more time exploring in
depth and at leisure. And maybe climb a few mountains too!

The drive to Killington from central New Jersey takes about
six hours. In my mellow state I didn’t get the crack-of-dawn start I had
planned, so limited my sight-seeing in route to only one stop. Nearer sites I
will leave for my return or another trip.

The stop I decided on is the Hyde Collection, an art museum
in Glens Falls, New York about 50 miles north of Albany on the Hudson River.
Glens Falls is for the most part an industrial town and not a particularly
attractive one at that. The main industry in the area has long been paper
manufacturing. I guess making paper is necessarily done close to where trees
grow, and there are probably more trees in the Adirondacks region of Upstate
New York than almost anywhere else in America. So the mills are still going in
an era when so many manufacturing plants across the country have closed in
favor of imports. Heck, Glens Falls is so industrial that there’s even a
factory along the river just down the hill from the Hyde Collection . I wonder
if the pollution affects the art?

The Hyde Collection makes its way onto many lists of significant
American art collections. It’s one of those that has its origins as the private
collection of one affluent husband and wife with a love for art. And naturally
for Glens Falls, the Hyde family’s wealth derives from the paper industry via
Charlotte Pruyn, eldest daughter of paper magnate Samuel Pruyn who married
Harvard law-educated Louis Hyde. In this respect the Hyde Collection is a more
like the Frick Collection, Barnes Collection, Huntington Gallery, or Isabella
Stewart Gardener Museum than the large municipal and academic art museums across
the country.

The Hyde Collection is much more about quality than
quantity. The museum is actually quite small and is mostly housed in the rooms
of the Hyde’s mansion, along with a modern exhibition space. The Hyde’s were
very selective in their art acquisitions, often setting out to purchase a work
by a particular master and waiting until the right object came on the market .
The collection is most known for a painting by Rembrandt as well as a large
number of prints by Rembrandt and Durer. Otherwise there’s usually not more
than one work by a famous major artist. Overall, the museum is pretty small,
but my main criticism is that the lighting in some rooms of the mansion is
rather poor. Some of the better paintings are in dark corners of the rooms
without enough light to fully appreciate their colors and textures.