OK, I got some eye roll from my co-captain on Kingston as the Heart of Darkness...  

Actually there was plenty of enlightenment in Kingston NY, namely the Hudson River Maritime Museum. If you are ever going to where we are going next (the Erie Canal), you definitely learn a lot about the voyage ahead and why it is where it is.  The museum has a wealth of information on the native Americans that inhabited the Hudson River Valley, Henry Hudson’s journey, all the canals built in the region, and the history of ship and tug commerce on the river from 1609 to today.

Kingston, via Rondout Creek, was once the mouth of the Delaware & Hudson Canal – the waterway that connected the Hudson River with the anthracite coalfields of northeast Pennsylvania.  What enabled them to build a canal was the narrow valley between the Shawangunk Ridge and the Catskill Mountains.  The canal, finished in 1828, required a climb of 600 feet via 108 locks over 108 miles (lots of locking) – with a gravity railroad bringing coal from Carbondale mines to barges in Honesdale – ultimately carrying 90,000 tones of coal by 1832.   The waterway died an ignominious death in 1898 when the canals were drained and the rights of way sold off to the railroads – you can visit the site of the canal if you drive down highways US 6, PA 209 and US 209 which follow or were built on top of it.

There is also a delightful Trolley Museum on the waterfront in Kingston with a 1920’s era streetcar that will take you from Kingston City Marina all the way out to Kingston Point.