The Area · Finger Lakes · New York
You picked
a good spot.
We've hosted here for over a decade and lived here longer. This isn't everything there is to do in the Finger Lakes — it's the short list we give our friends.
Waterfalls & Gorges
Start with the water. Everyone does.
Taughannock Falls is five minutes from our door and, at 215 feet, taller than Niagara. The flat gorge trail to the base takes about half an hour each way and works for every age and knee; the rim trail above earns you the overlook. Go early or go at dusk — midday in summer belongs to the tour buses.
Closer to Ithaca, Buttermilk Falls and Robert Treman State Park stack cascade after cascade along their gorge trails — and Treman has the thing nobody believes until they're in it: a natural gorge swimming hole below a waterfall, lifeguarded in summer. Watkins Glen State Park, under an hour away, is the famous one — nineteen waterfalls threaded by stone stairways and bridges. It's worth the drive and the crowds both.
Wine & Drink
The ones we actually pour.
The Cayuga Lake Wine Trail starts minutes from the property, and you could spend a happy week working down it. But if you want the honest version: these are the bottles and pints that show up at our own gatherings.
- Dr. Konstantin Frank — Keuka Lake
- The family that proved European grapes could survive Finger Lakes winters, and still one of the best producers in the region. Their semi-dry Riesling is what we serve at our own events. The drive to Keuka is a beautiful hour; make an afternoon of it.
- Boundary Breaks — Seneca Lake
- Riesling specialists on the east shore, with lake views that do half the work of the pour. One of our standing favourites — the bottles that come home with us.
- Silver Thread Vineyard — Seneca Lake
- Biointensive, sustainable winemaking done seriously — farming as careful as the wine. Small and personal, which is the charm: make a tasting reservation before you drive.
- Lucky Hare Brewing — Hector
- Our house beer, on the east side of Seneca Lake among the vineyards. When we run a bar, it's their ales in the taps.
- Lively Run Goat Dairy — Interlaken
- Ten minutes up the road, and the source of the Cayuga Blue on our cheese boards. Visit the farm, meet the goats, leave with more cheese than you planned.
- Finger Lakes Cider House — Interlaken
- The cider house on the farm just up the road — and the best Friday night in the area from spring through fall: live music, amazing cider, and food worth planning your evening around. Go once and it becomes the standing plan.
- The Cayuga Lake Wine Trail
- A dozen-plus wineries along the lake's west side, many within twenty minutes of the property — the classic tasting afternoon without the long drive. For the east-of-Seneca weekend version, our winery route is mapped →
The Village
Trumansburg is small on purpose.
One real Main Street — restaurants, cafés, shops, a library — a few minutes from the farm property and two blocks from our village houses. It's the kind of place where dinner doesn't need a reservation most nights and the person behind the counter remembers you by the second morning.
And once a year, the village becomes briefly famous: the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival takes over the Trumansburg Fairgrounds on the third full weekend of July — four days of music that people plan their whole summer around. If your dates touch it, book everything early; if you didn't know, now you know why that weekend looked different.
- Gimme! Coffee — the morning ritual; the roaster the whole region knows, right here in the village.
- Creekside Cafe — our sit-down breakfast pick; open Friday through Sunday, and worth planning around.
- Falls Restaurant — the classic village breakfast counter.
- Main Street Market — made-to-order sandwiches and locally sourced everything; the move for a picnic headed to the falls.
- Atlas Bowl — dinner and a few frames of bowling under one roof; the village's easiest good evening.
Twenty Minutes Away
Ithaca, for a day of it.
A college city with a real food scene, twenty minutes down the lake. The Ithaca Farmers Market on the waterfront is the weekend institution — go hungry. The Commons downtown is the walking-around part: bookstores, restaurants, the wine shop for bottles to bring back. For breakfast or lunch, our pick is Farm to Feast — a chef-driven café two doors from the State Theatre doing house-made shokupan toasts, ramen and sandwiches from local farms; it's the same local-first cooking we try to live by, done by people who mean it. Cornell's campus is genuinely worth wandering even with no one to visit — the Botanic Gardens are free, and Cascadilla Gorge climbs right out of downtown, a waterfall staircase hiding in plain sight. And Ithaca Falls is the one nobody believes: a 150-foot waterfall a flat two-minute walk from a city street, free, no hike required.
When to Come
Every season has its argument.
- Late spring
- Waterfalls at full roar, trails empty, the tree tents go up in May. The secret good season.
- Early summer
- Fireflies come up out of the meadow at dusk in June — watchable from every porch and fire pit we have.
- High summer
- Gorge swimming, wine trail afternoons, GrassRoots in July, evenings that stay warm past the last log.
- Fall
- October foliage over the lakes is the postcard, and harvest is the wine trail at its best. Books up — plan ahead.
- Winter
- The quiet season, and ours: a jetted tub at the barn, a wood-fired sauna in the village, snow on the pines, nobody on the trails.
And Then, Evenings
The best thing to do here is stop doing things.
The honest secret of the Finger Lakes: the days fill themselves, and the evenings are the point. A fire, a bottle from the afternoon's trail, and dark enough sky to actually see stars. Every place we host is built around exactly that hour.
Plan Your Days
Want it already worked out?
We've turned our favourite versions of a trip here into ready-made plans — take them whole, or raid them for parts.
The 3-Day Trip
A long weekend done right — the village, the falls, and a lakeside last morning.
See the itinerary →The Full Week
Seven days across both lakes — gorges, wineries, museums, and room to do nothing at all.
See the itinerary →The Winery Route
Our favourite wineries east of Seneca, mapped, with the weekend route from Shona's own bachelorette.
See the guide →Stay in the Middle of It
All of this, from one address.
A farmhouse, a barn, and a village studio year-round — tree tents in the pines in season, and our own historic home a few times a year — all within minutes of everything on this page.