Since our trip hasn't started yet, here's something to keep this site from languishing in blog limbo. We made a trip to Upstate New York earlier this year to see the new museum Dia : Beacon (that's the town it's in) and a building by Frank Gehry at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

If you are in New York and carless, you can get to Dia:Beacon on Metro North. The museum is in a newly-converted factory building with three floors filled with long-term installations by many major contemporary artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Walter deMaria, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. When we visited it was still getting its finishing touches and they hadn't gotten around to installing adequate directional signage in the downtown area. We finally found it, had a lovely breakfast in their cafe and enjoyed the lack of crowds always present in museums in New York. Photography is not allowed inside the museum, but Eddy was more interested in photographing the building than the art so he pulled off a hip-shot.

Annandale-on-Hudson is a tiny town roughly 30 minutes by car from Beacon. I suppose it is also serviced by Metro North but I am not sure of the convenience of getting from the train station to Bard College. If you are in New York and are devastated by the scrapping of the plans for the new Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum, a trip here might ameliorate some of the pain. It is Bard's auditorium and I think the donor name is Solomon. Having been to the EMP in Seattle (went in to the lobby, checked out entry fee, enjoyed lobby, left), this was the first Gehry building I really got to go into. Sort of. No sooner had we had crossed the auditorium lobby, than a facilities guy kicked us out. Apparently, there are organized tours you can take and that day's tour was already over. The inside was very regimented compared to the outside, amazingly there were a lot of right angles inside that whacky flowing roof.