The countryside in the US is truly wild and we Brits aren’t used to it

Holly Baxter feels a long way from home on her trip upstate among the wild deer and (gulp!) bears

North-South Lake in the Catskill Mountains, New York (Getty/iStockphoto)

A few months ago, my fiance and I took a look at our honeymoon fund – returned to us after all our flights and hotels for a once-in-a-lifetime tour round southeast Asia were cancelled in the wake of the pandemic – and wondered if we should do something with it. Most of it, we knew, we should keep in savings: jobs are insecure, New York is expensive, and we didn’t know when we might want or need to fly transatlantically to see our families in a possible emergency, never mind what medical costs we could potentially rack up if either of us contracted the virus. Almost all of it now remains squirreled away for a rainy day (well, the bit we didn’t use for the patches of rain we’ve already encountered.) But a couple of weeks ago, when the infection rate in New York state looked particularly low, we decided that we may as well treat ourselves to a much cheaper and more conservative week away. That’s the reason why I’m writing this from a polished Scandinavian desk overlooking a lake and a forest rather than from my kitchen table-cum-bedside nook in my Brooklyn studio apartment.

Upstate New York is a beautiful and highly underrated place. Tourists come to New York City and often pass by the rest of the surprisingly large state, but the island of Manhattan is a tiny slice of a much bigger area. Here in the Hudson Valley, wild deer and turkeys strut around outside our isolated Airbnb cabin, and bears wander along the section of the Appalachian Trail down the road that we plan to hike tomorrow.

I grew up in Newcastle and the scariest thing I ever encountered outdoors was the Geordie dress code in sub-zero temperatures