Matthew J. Hereford
Executive Director

“Allons! Whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.”
-Walt Whitman from "Song of the Open Road"

As Executive Director of the New York U.S. Route 6 Tourist Association, I would like to welcome you to our 78.09 miles of “open road” on the U.S. Route 6 Grand Army of the Republic Highway in New York.
   With the route’s western anchor of Port Jervis, NY, the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River as its center, and Brewster, NY anchoring the east, the Route 6 tour is a classic “town and country” experience of American heritage and economic development. Driving Route 6 through New York will take you along scenic vistas of dramatic elevations, placid reservoirs destined for the bustle of New York City, the vast expanse of the mighty Hudson River and the driveway to the markets and businesses of Main Street America.

   Whether looking for a day trip for a Sunday drive or including the route for a diversion on a cross-country trek, exit onto NY’s U.S. Route 6 Grand Army of the Republic Highway and enter on the “new old.” So, “Allons! Come travel and join New York’s U.S. Route 6”.

My family comes from a long line of pioneer stock: Pilgrims, Huguenots, Quakers, Palatines, wanderers, trappers, hunters, farmers, smithies, soldiers and doctors.  My great interest in genealogy has sparked fervor for the past and helps me recognize that which, in itself, is history.

  I enjoy traveling, nature, hiking, cooking, camping, outdoor sports and photography.   Slowing my car for a look at wild turkey, a red-tailed hawk or the tine count on a grazing buck is just part of my natural being.  If it’s business, well, I want to get from point A to point B as soon as possible.  But give me a free afternoon, with the sun scattered amid the clouds, and off I roam at my own metronome’s pace.

     As a classically trained chef, I worked in NYC for close to a decade, with a summer in Provence, France, to cook with a chef friend of mine.   There I was taught that time, like food, is to be savored.  The experience stuck with me and I eventually made my way up the Hudson to marry and raise a family and manage my in-laws’ Irish pub, Fiddlers Green, on U.S. Route 6 in Carmel, NY.

      I inherited the chef trade from my grandmother, who owned and operated an 1850 manor house in the Finger Lakes that she converted into a restaurant in the 1960s.  It was situated on a small county route, where cars could pull up to her farm stand and buy Concord grape pies, jam and quarts of the fresh and pungent grapes that were harvested from the farm’s vineyards.  

     The people were not always locals.  They were travelers, sight-seeing the wonders of the country, enjoying the long spans of the ancient glacier-carved lakes of Central and Western New York.  None were in a hurry to hop on the state thruway or even the nearby four-lane highway to get back to the “rat race,” a term I heard many times as a little helper, which always made me giggle at the thought of rats racing.

    It wasn’t until I became part of the “race” that I was able to appreciate that time on a road is a metronome to the pace one desires to set within the tempo of the quickened everyday life.  It is on the highway that we can adjust the window of time to pass more slowly, as we reflect, admire, absorb and restore, while the tires click the measured beat of “the open road.”