Weird day trips from New York City

The strangest New York City finds are often a short drive out. These 24 day trips — Sleepy Hollow Cemetery & Old Dutch Church, Storm King Art Center, Nitro Girl (Werbany Tire Town) and more — are each hand-vetted and sourced: ghost towns, hot-spring soaks, roadside oddities, and odd small-town museums worth the gas. A weird day trip is its own kind of date.

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Sleepy Hollow Cemetery & Old Dutch Church The 90-acre cemetery and the adjacent circa-1685 Old Dutch Church burying ground are the real-world settings… Sleepy Hollow, NY (Westchester County)
Storm King Art Center Storm King spreads more than 100 monumental sculptures across 500 acres of fields, hills and woods in the Hud… New Windsor, New York
Nitro Girl (Werbany Tire Town) An 18-foot fiberglass giantess has loomed over Werbany Tire Town since 1965, bought by founder Ed Werbany Sr.… Blackwood, New Jersey
New York Wedding Ring (Sam Abbay) Master goldsmith Sam Abbay runs day-long, one-on-one workshops where couples actually fabricate their own wed… Manhattan, NYC
Custer Institute & Observatory Long Island's oldest public observatory, founded in 1927 and run by volunteers, opens its doors every Saturda… Southold, NY (North Fork, Long Island)
Warwick Drive-In Theatre A family-run triple-screen drive-in spread over 11 acres of farmland, showing first-run double features under… Warwick, NY (Hudson Valley)
Taconic Sculpture Park Self-taught sculptor Roy Kanwit spent some 40 years populating his hillside yard with more than 30 figures fr… Spencertown / Chatham
Opus 40 Sculptor Harvey Fite spent 37 years single-handedly fitting thousands of bluestone pieces into a sprawling si… Saugerties
World's Largest Kaleidoscope Built inside a 56-foot former grain silo at the Emerson Resort, this is certified as the world's largest kale… Mount Tremper
Secret Caverns This limestone cave is famous less for geology than for its gleefully deranged hand-painted folk-art billboar… Howes Cave / Cobleskill
Wing's Castle Artists Peter and Toni Wing began hand-building this stone castle in 1970 out of roughly 85% salvaged materia… Millbrook
The Cardiff Giant This ten-foot 'petrified man' was secretly carved from gypsum, buried on a Cardiff, NY farm in 1868, and 'dis… Cooperstown
The Big Duck This 20-foot ferrocement building shaped like a giant white Pekin duck was built in 1931 by a duck farmer to… Flanders (Long Island)
Andover Mine Dating back to before 1763, the Andover Mine was once one of New Jersey's most prolific iron mines, famously… Newton
Ringwood Iron Plant Mine Dating back to the 1700s, this historic 500-acre iron mining district once supplied raw materials for the Ame… Ringwood
Old Ogden Mine The Old Ogden Mine, later incorporated into Thomas Edison's ill-fated Edison Mines complex, is a historic 19t… Sparta
Waterloo Mine Located within Allamuchy Mountain State Park, the Waterloo Mine (also known as the Brookfield Mine) is a defu… Stanhope
Boston Mine Located in Harriman State Park, the Boston Mine is a historic 19th-century iron mine that was last worked aro… Southfields
Staley Mine Discovered in 1832 to supply the nearby Oxford Furnace, the Staley Mine (also known as the Straley Mine) was… Oxford
ORAK Mansion Ruins Built in 1923 by George Briggs Buchanan, a vice president of the company that manufactured Karo syrup, this e… Stony Point
Boonton Iron Works Ruins Established in 1830, the Boonton Iron Works was a massive iron manufacturing complex that utilized the Morris… Boonton
Pine Meadow Lake Pump House Ruins These stone ruins are the remnants of a water pumping station built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)… Pomona
Ruins of King Zog Estate Originally built between 1906 and 1920 as the Knollwood Estate, this grand 60-room mansion was purchased in 1… Syosset
Ruins of Lincoln Blacksmith Shop Dating back to the early 18th century, this roofless sandstone ruin was once an active blacksmith shop and ir… Cream Ridge