a change of pace

The next few days are Hudson River Valley days - although as is probably totally obvious, it's pouring with rain, which may create some interesting glitches to my over-ambitious itinerary ... It's been a day of semi-glitches: hard to get across town to Penn Station, in NY, because of many marching Poles in the 84th Annual Pulaski Day parade (I had the baddest tempered cab driver - which is saying something in NY); the electronic info boards in the snazzy new hall in Penn Station all being out of order (and why can't one find a post office when one needs one?  Because it's been turned into a railway station); and an email from my hotel in Hudson saying Whoops, so sorry, but their restaurant is closed today because someone has come down with Covid ....  But they helpfully rebooked me to somewhere down the street.  Hudson is probably very twee, but is rather - so far - like a US version of somewhere (twee) in the Cotswolds, and very wonderfully quiet after New York.  Luckily I managed to find my train; less luckily, I was next to an anti-masking jerk (AND THERE WERE NO OTHER SEATS) who not only was man-spreading, but ranting on (to thin air, because I certainly and determinedly wasn't registering his presence) about how he couldn't wait to get out of New York State and back to Florida; what was all of this Mask Mandate crap; he'd been in Times Square last night and there were thousands of people and None of them were wearing masks.  I was impressed by my stoic buttoned up silence: my only words to him - when he asked me where I was heading - were "up the track."  But - oy.  It was a salutary, or probably non-salutary, reminder of how, in my bubble, one just doesn't encounter people quite like that ...