We had never planned to spend another week in New York, but we started getting lazy about booking Airbnbs in advance and began to run out of options. But Leeds, a small town in the Catskills, ended up being a pretty delightful stop.

Our Airbnb was a third of a mile from a very small downtown area, so we walked there a few times to get coffee and food. Daniel also stopped at a very cluttered antiques shop there and found a joke book from 1922, which he promptly bought.

The Airbnb was also located immediately across the street from a cow pasture, so most mornings some cows would make an appearance while grazing. Winnie bravely and steadfastly defended her family by barking at those cows, even though there were across the street and behind a fence.

On our first day there we went on a big run across a long bridge spanning the Hudson. Bridge runs are great - they’re long, paved stretches of sidewalk, so you can really focus on the good views.

Another fun point of interest near here was the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. An aerodrome is a mostly-British term for an airfield that’s not quite large enough to be called an airport. This one had a large collection of WWI-era aircraft and vehicles. And not just museum pieces - some of them were functional enough that they put on an airshow! Daniel is a boy so he loved this. Unfortunately, they also employed some pyrotechnics during the show, and Winnie is a dog so she did not love this. We ended up having to leave the show early to spare her little ears.

But we had a lot of fun exploring before the show. We started chatting with one of the volunteers there who turned out to be a former engineer in the British Royal Air Force. His accent was right at the limits of our comprehension, but that proved a fun additional challenge in trying to decipher some of the jokes he was trying to tell us. One of them, which was clearly a go-to for him, was “when I moved to America it was the first time I was the only person around without an accent!”

We also learned that Winnie can fly a biplane! She was ready to take off and participate in the air show but was grounded due to colorblindness.

PS we also spotted a yeti:

• How much we’d like to visit again: 3/10. We had a nice time, but there was nothing too special here.
• How much we’d like to live here: 3/10. Again, not a bad place, but not enough to write home about.