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The Taconic State Parkway -- a scenic escape route from New York City

© Brian Salisbury

On a lazy spring Friday some years ago, when I was working in New York City, my boss asked me to deliver a package to a client in upstate New York near Albany.

It meant that I could leave work early and drive about 125 miles north through the green hills and valleys of Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess and Columbia counties. The plan was to meet the client at a nice restaurant and have dinner, then take a slow ride home and start my weekend.

It was a tough assignment, but somebody had to do it. Plus, it gave me a perfect reason to take a motorcycle ride on the Taconic State Parkway -- one of the nicest roads in eastern New York.

A trooper disrupts my revelry

Just a few hours later, I was well into my ride and thoroughly blissed out as I leaned into a series of wide sweepers through rolling farmland. As I streaked under one of the parkway’s low, stone faced bridges and came out the other side, I caught a quick glimpse of a trooper parked close to the bridge abutment just off the road.

He had me cold.

I pulled over and stopped on the wide, clover-covered apron even before the trooper pulled away from his hiding place. By the time he reached me, I had my helmet off and my license out.

While he wrote me up, we talked about motorcycles, the warm spring weather, the seductive lines of the Taconic Parkway and how the road entices drivers to push the posted speed limits.

Other than the points the speeding ticked added to my license, the entire encounter was very low impact. Almost pleasant. But, to this day, I always slow down when I approach that particular underpass.

When I need an escape route out of metropolitan area, I’m often drawn to the Taconic State Parkway as both an experience in itself and a portal to great rides in Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and New Jersey, as well as eastern New York.

The road’s character changes with the terrain

From the town of Hawthorne in Westchester County to East Chatham in Columbia County, the 105-mile long parkway’s personality changes three or four times as it blends into and assumes the character of its surroundings. Also, after decades of planning and construction from 1929 to 1963, different sections of the road reflect the architecture and traffic patterns of the time.

For example, the 20-mile long section built between 1932 and 1938 took the parkway through Putnam County and into southern Dutchess County. Back then, cars drove on two, narrow, undivided lanes through a tight corridor in the mountains that is bordered by cliffs and trees.