Planning Sleepy Hollow

Last weekend the hubs and I went to Sleepy Hollow, New York for a little weekend getaway. For those unfamiliar with the area, it is a small town just north (30 miles north) of New York City, full of history and legend. The town was made famous by Washington Irving’s story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The mascot for the town is the Headless Horseman, as pictured at the right. You might also be familiar with the title due to the new television show. (By the way, the show’s storyline has absolutely nothing to do with the original tale. The only things borrowed from the original story are character names and the idea of the Headless Horseman. However, the show does boast a very good-looking British lead character. This makes the show worth watching, in my opinion. Of course, it’s generally entertaining as well. But I digress…)

Having never been to Sleepy Hollow and knowing virtually nothing about it, I had to do a little research and planning in order to prepare for our trip. The first thing I did was visit the town’s website. There are a ton of things to do there. Yes, there was more for us to do since it was right after Halloween, which is their busy season. But there is also a lot of historical sites as well. But what to choose for a three-day adventure? I had to start somewhere…

First, I used Evernote to capture all of the events we were at least interested in.

I renamed each note so that I knew what was related to different areas of interest, such as historic sites, fun things to do, and places to eat. This made it a lot easier when referencing the notes.

Then, we went through all of the options. In my planner (under the Projects tab), I made a list of the things we wanted to do and when.

Since I knew I wouldn’t carry my planner with me when out and about, I decided to make shortcuts to all of the things we were interested in on Evernote so that I didn’t have to weed through the vast list of things we weren’t interested in.

So when we were ready to do something new or to choose a place to eat, I simply whipped out my phone, looked in Evernote, and selected an option. This helped, too, with directions. It was nice to be able to just pull up the note, copy the address, and paste it into Google Maps.

Of course, some activities required advanced reservations and specific times, so this only refers to activates that were a little unplanned and/or spontaneous. For anything we did make reservations for, I kept my confirmation emails organized with a specific “Sleepy Hollow” label in my email.

This system worked very well, and I can see us using this again in the future.

Overall, we had a lovely weekend full of historic and fun Halloween-type activities. So to introduce you (or perhaps reintroduce you, if you’ve already been) to Sleepy Hollow, I leave you with some photos from our weekend.

Enjoy!