Round Top Retreat 2025

This past weekend, Crystal went to NYC with her brother to see Leslie Odom Jr reprise the role of Aaron Burr in Hamilton. The original plan was for Lily to stay at home with me, but at the last minute, her grandparents invited her to stay with them, which left me free for the weekend.

For a couple of months now, I have been thinking about camping. I used to go as a kid, but didn't fully appreciate it at the time. I think only when you become an adult and have been navigating the modern world for decades does the appeal of getting away from it all really sink in. I have also been reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau, which has piqued my interest in limited spurts of primitive isolation. No screens, no work, no schedules, no neighbors, no worries. Just a fire and a comfortable place to sit. Not forever. Just for a few days.

But with Crystal's asthma being triggered by wood smoke and neither Crystal nor Lily having any interest in "roughing it," I knew it was something I had to do by myself. And when this opportunity arose, I jumped on it. I registered at Hipcamp and started looking at cabins. My criteria were as follows.

1. Costs under $100 per night
2. Is less than 200 miles from home
3. Has a wood-burning stove
4. Has no electricity
5. Is isolated in the woods
6. Is near hiking trails

Since it was so last-minute and for many cabins this was the last weekend before they closed for the winter, a couple of my top choices weren't available. But then I found Round Top Retreat (Hipcamp, What3Words) about 15 miles east of Ithaca, NY. It's a 100-year-old cabin with no electricity, a hand-operated water pump on a well, an outhouse, and two wood-burning stoves. It comes with pre-split wood and has been updated with new(ish) windows, insulation, and a loft for sleeping. It is right on the edge of Robinson's Hollow State Forest, is 120 miles from home, and there are level-3 EV charging stations at the West Junius truck stop, which is right en route. Perfect!

Thursday

I spent Thursday night furiously preparing. I needed an air mattress, a sleeping bag, candles, a fire-starting kit, matches, food, and other odds and ends. Fortunately, I already had most of the cooking equipment I needed in my "cheese shed," i.e. the corner of the garage where I set up a makeshift kitchen to eat things that Lily is allergic to.

Friday

I hoped to get on the road early and arrive before sundown, but I got tied up at work. I didn't arrive at the cabin until 7:30 PM, and by then it was already completely dark. I unpacked via flashlight, lit some candles, then got to work starting a fire in the wood-burning stove to cook my dinner.

I finally got to eat at 10:00 PM, left the dishes for the morning, read for a little while, then went to bed. It was so quiet! No white noise machines, fans, or air purifiers. (I love you, Crystal, but you need a lot of noise to sleep.) Just crickets and the occasional critter scratching around outside the cabin.

Saturday

Saturday went much more smoothly. I was woken up at 8:00 AM by the sunlight coming in through the skylights above the loft. It was pretty chilly (around 40°F) since the fire from last night went out at some point in the night. I immediately got started making another for my breakfast. While the stove warmed up, I had my first opportunity to take some pictures of the cabin.

At around 9:30 AM, with the stove nice and hot, the cabin had warmed up (around 60°F), and I could start cooking.

After eating, I washed all the dishes from dinner and breakfast in a basin I brought from home filled with well water.

Fortunately, someone had left a soup pot in the cabin, so I put some well water on the stove to warm up for next time. I intended to keep the fire going all day to keep the cabin warm and to avoid the hassle of having to start another one for dinner.

Now that I was fed and my chores were done, it was time to go for a hike. The cabin's driveway continues up the hillside for about 0.5 miles or so, turns into a walking trail through some fields—presumably left by hunters—then goes back into the forest. It was a pretty intense uphill hike most of the way out. After about a mile, the trail faded into general wilderness (somewhere around here), and I was tired, so I turned around for the much easier downhill walk back to the cabin.

Once back at the cabin, I tossed another log on the fire and settled in for some reading until it was time to start making dinner. I started reading Thinking to Some Purpose by Susan Stebbing. Stebbing was a philosophy professor in London who published Thinking to Some Purpose in 1939 with the hope of teaching critical thinking to the general population to counter the proliferation of Fascist and Communist propaganda in Europe before World War II. It seems very relevant to the times we currently live in, and I will likely write a post about it when I'm done.

Around 4:00 PM, I decided it was time to start preparing dinner to avoid having to cook or clean in the dark.

After dinner, I did the dishes; this time with daylight and warm water. I did some more reading by the fire until dusk, then lit some candles and continued playing a solo journaling RPG I have been working on, Thousand-Year-Old Vampire.

The gist of TYOV is that the game guides you through the creation of a mortal character and contains dozens of journaling prompts that you navigate by rolling dice. Each prompt propels your character through a story of being turned into a vampire and living for centuries afterward. I will likely write a post about this when I am done.

It had been a long day, and being in mostly darkness for several hours makes you sleepy, so I turned in around 10:00 PM.

Sunday

I was up around 8:00 AM. The fire had gone out during the night again, so it was very cold in the cabin; colder than the night before. I quickly got another fire going and was cooking by 9:00. I had the same meal as Saturday: tea, breakfast sandwiches, and home fries, which were much better than Saturday's attempt. Then started the sad task of packing up. After loading the car, locking up the cabin, and notifying the host that I was leaving. I tuned into the Bills/Panthers game on my phone and drove home.

It was dark for most of my trip down, so I hadn't gotten to see much of the scenery. On the way home, I got to see parts of Ithaca, Cayuga Lake, and the forests of the Finger Lakes region. It really is a beautiful place. Their rural areas aren't dominated by farmland like around Hilton. They appreciate their undisturbed nature in a way that I hadn't realized was lacking back home. You'd think living in an exurb would mean you have better access to nature, but that isn't really the case. It's all taken over my corn and soybean fields. There are only a couple of parks, and either 1) they are not very big, or 2) they are heavily developed with sports fields, playgrounds, and pavilions. There isn't a lot of actual nature near where I live.

Conclusion

I think I would have liked to stay just another day or two longer. A week would be too long to stay by myself. I could see doing it with some friends, though. Board games in a cabin? Yes, please!

I would definitely like to go back to Round Top Retreat, but there are also so many other nice-looking cabins in that area. Watkins Glen, Trumansburg, the whole southern tier region is peppered with them. Then there are the Adirondacks, which are farther away, but I have some fond memories of camping there as a kid.

Crystal and I have also talked about building something to go glamping in, like in the video below. A tiny house somewhere near nature with most of the amenities of home (electricity, heat, air conditioning, plumbing, etc) but in the woods and near hiking trails. It would also be exclusively ours, so we wouldn't have to worry about cleaning everything when we arrive to avoid cross-contamination with Lily's food. If we move forward with it, there will absolutely be posts.