Babes in the Berks

When we think of a girls' weekend, often a spa getaway comes to mind. In fact, with a big birthday around the corner and a plan for my first-ever girls' weekend, a spa was what came to mind because hey, that's what girls do, right?

But as I looked at spas, it just didn't seem like the weekend I always wanted. The cost would be high, (I aimed to keep it low,) and we'd be spending a lot of our time "together" in different treatment rooms having different experiences. My friends were from different points in my life and no one had met before so I wanted to make the weekend as comfortable as possible for all.

The Berkshires quickly seemed like the perfect option since friends were coming from both Boston and New York. We decided to rent a house in order to have the most privacy and space for drinking goblets (and goblets) of wine. Two great sites for house rentals are VRBO and HomeAway. We found a beautiful, fully renovated house in the heart of Great Barrington that slept seven of us comfortably for $60 per night per person.

Friday night we ordered in from the best pizza joint in town, Baba Louie's. Each pizza is topped with mounds of gourmet toppings and is worth the calorie intake (Coconut, shrimp, pineapple, and Canadian bacon on a pizza sounds weird but tastes great.)

Saturday morning we awoke to crisp mountain air and the most perfect blue skies. After downing donuts from the delectable Home Sweet Home Doughnut Shoppe we headed to what was hands-down the best part of the entire weekend, Catamount Trees. Catamount Trees is an aerial zip line and ropes course high up in the mountains that was a challenge, even for the experienced rock climber and the marathoner in our group. Catamount is on the border of New York and Massachusetts, less than a two-hour drive from Scarsdale.

Adrenaline is the best-known antidote to a stomach stuffed with donuts. Each person was fitted for a harness and we were given a brief safety talk and a few instructions on how to work the gear that was now attached to us. We walked up the mountain to the base of the aerial ropes course and were amazed at the intricacy, organization, and (admittedly) perceived difficulty of it. The course is unguided, so you must attach, reattach, and detach yourself to the lines along the way including the zip lines.

Everyone must start on the easier courses (yellow then green) and as you move to more difficult ones (blues and black diamonds), increased strength, agility, and balance are needed...as is more courage! There are 12 courses and over 170 elements in total. We all cheered one another on and had to help each other figure out the optimal way to get across, up, down, or through the various elements since there are numerous ways to tackle each. No element is the same. There are bridges, ladders, obstacles, and zip lines and just when you think you've done it all, another element pops up that offers a completely new challenge. We moved from platform to platform and sailed high through the tree tops on zip lines together which made this really special to do as a group.

After free falling (holy crap!) and then auto-belaying down the last element of our last course (difficulty level blue), we regrouped and headed to Tripadvisor's number on pick for food in Great Barrington. The Bistro Box is a roadside stand that has picnic tables and great music coming out of funky speakers. Their garlic and herbed French fries and grated Parmesan and truffle oil French fries are to die for (see picture), and this is coming from a person who (no joke) has never liked fries, even as a kid. The chefs trained at the Culinary Institute of America and are the real deal. They serve the freshest food imaginable out of their "box." It was so good we returned for lunch the next day. Why mess with perfection?

With a sense of accomplishment, we headed back to the house and took turns taking the owners' kayaks for a sunset paddle around Lake Mansfield while the rest of us reminisced about the day and drank good wine. We ordered in again and played "fact or fiction," a game in which we each had to give the others a chance to guess which absurd or outrageous fact was true versus the two that weren't. We had many laughs and learned a lot about each other.

Sunday morning we had local bagels comparable to New York's finest and went apple picking at Windy Hill Farm. The apple orchard is well laid out with signs that show what's ripe for the picking. The farm is beautiful, facing Monument Mountain. Unlike orchards in the Hudson Valley, there were no crowds. The apple varieties were pleasing and there were lots of ripe apples easy to pick. There weren't many rotting apples under the trees so there were very few bees and flies.

Finally, we headed out on one last adventure to Bash Bish Falls, a pristine waterfall in the Taconic Mountains on the Massachusetts/New York border. A short but steep hike led us to an area that you could boulder your way around to get closer to the falls. It also got us a little too close to a rather long copperhead snake, one of the few poisonous snakes in the region.

The Berkshires is packed with many other options for girls' weekend fun. There is the Norman Rockwell Museum, the Mass MOCA art museum, hiking at Monument Mountain and Mt. Greylock, biking, lots of restaurant options, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and much else. Oh, and of course, if you'd rather be fully pampered, there's always the spa option at Canyon Ranch.