With the dog days of summer behind us and the fall foliage season just ahead, Westchester County officials have launched a series of “Falltastic Favorite Escapes” as part of the county tourism and film office’s four-month-old Meet Me in Westchester campaign.
Online visitors to Escapes.VisitWestchesterNY.com will find favorite fall itineraries that include restaurant choices of actress and Chappaqua resident Vanessa Williams and spooky Halloween picks from the Headless Horseman, riding out of Washington Irving”™s 19th-century literary thriller, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
For tourists who find escape in history, there is the two-day African American Heritage Trail tour. It begins in Katonah at the John Jay Homestead and leads visitors to Tarrytown and Foster Memorial AME Zion Church, whose members offered safe havens to fugitive slaves. In Yonkers, the tour includes stops at the statue of jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald outside the downtown Metro-North Railroad station and an African cemetery.
Additional fall escapes feature golfing, shopping, more historic sites and restaurants, music venues, country walking and bike trails throughout the county.
In concert with the county tourism promotion, Westchester hotels are offering fall overnight packages. They include tickets to events such as the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, the tri-state area’s largest Halloween event; farm to table offerings, where guests can visit local farms to pick produce and have it incorporated into dinner at their hotel, and pumpkin carving lessons.
“The 32 members of the Westchester Hotel Association are pleased to join in the launch of the autumn season and in promoting the many advantages that come with meeting in Westchester,” said Dan Conte, general manager of the Westchester Marriott in Tarrytown and president of the county hotel association, in the announcement of the tourism campaign.
