Look Up: More Than 120 Balloon Launches Are Planned This Weekend
Alabama Shakes and Mavis Staples at Bethel Woods, Tomato Fest in Accord, 100 self-playing drums and a hidden Kerhonkson barn.
Labor Day weekend has one job: give summer a proper send-off.
Apparently the Hudson Valley understood the assignment.
More than 120 hot-air balloon launches are planned over Dutchess County. Alabama Shakes and Mavis Staples are spending Friday night at Bethel Woods. In Chatham, one hundred drums are about to start playing themselves. Accord is throwing an entire festival for peak tomato season. And in Tivoli, somebody is spending six hours doing exactly what we appreciate: playing records.
We also found a restored 19th-century dairy barn in Kerhonkson where art, food, farming and design all somehow end up under the same roof, plus a few things worth getting on the calendar before September gets away from us.
Explore the Hudson Valley
A restored dairy barn in Kerhonkson where contemporary art, farming, food and design all end up under the same roof.
You’d Never Guess What’s Inside This Kerhonkson Barn
From the outside, it looks like a beautifully restored old dairy barn.
Step inside and things get considerably more interesting.
Ravenwood brings together contemporary art, food, farming and design inside a restored 19th-century barn, with rotating exhibitions woven through a space that feels more like somebody’s very beautiful home than a traditional gallery.
For its 2026 season, the barn is open for weekly gatherings with painting, sculpture, ceramics, wood and fiber alongside a café menu and farm stand built around what’s growing and being harvested right now.
Come to see what’s on the walls and tables, stay for something to eat, wander the barn and grounds, and expect the experience to change with the season.
Why we recommend it: Ravenwood is exactly the kind of place Circle This exists to find: beautiful, creative, local and almost impossible to put into one category. Part gallery, part farm, part café, part gathering place — and very much worth knowing about.
This Weekend
Balloons over Dutchess County, Alabama Shakes and Mavis Staples at Bethel Woods, peak tomato season in Accord, six hours of vinyl in Tivoli and more than 100 drums playing themselves in Chatham.
Look Up: More Than 120 Balloon Launches Are Planned This Weekend
This is one of those weekends when getting up before sunrise might actually be worth it.
The Hudson Valley Hot-Air Balloon Festival returns to Tymor Park with more than 120 planned balloon launches across five mass ascensions, including sunrise launches Saturday and Sunday and evening launches all three nights.
After dark, the balloons stay grounded but keep glowing, with nighttime balloon illuminations and fireworks planned each evening.
There are also tethered rides, full balloon flights, live entertainment, food trucks and family activities — but the reason to go remains beautifully simple: watching a field full of enormous balloons slowly rise into the Hudson Valley sky.
Why we recommend it: Plenty of festivals fill a park. This one temporarily changes the skyline.
Some Weekends Need a Big Show. This Is It.
Labor Day weekend is getting a very good soundtrack.
Alabama Shakes bring Brittany Howard’s unmistakable voice back to the stage Friday night at Bethel Woods, with the band reunited around the songs that turned Boys & Girls and Sound & Color into modern rock landmarks.
And “very special guest” is doing some serious work here: Mavis Staples opens the night, bringing more than seven decades of gospel, soul, blues and American music to the Pavilion.
Two generations of extraordinary voices, Friday night of Labor Day weekend, on the grounds of the original Woodstock festival.
Why we recommend it: Every big holiday weekend needs a musical centerpiece. This is ours.
Peak Tomato Season Gets Its Own Festival in Accord
Apparently the perfect late-summer tomato deserves more than a sandwich.
Hudson Valley Seed Co. is celebrating peak tomato season with an afternoon of tastings, cooking demonstrations, seed processing, live screen printing, garden tours, food and music.
There’s also pick-your-own dahlias, eco-fashion, compost demonstrations, an herbal tea bouquet workshop, artists and enough tomatoes to fully justify calling the whole thing a festival.
Why we recommend it: This is exactly the kind of hyperlocal thing we love — a little nerdy, very Hudson Valley and much more fun than it has any right to be.
An All-Vinyl Afternoon at a Brewery in Tivoli
There are more complicated ways to spend the last Saturday of summer, but we’re not convinced they’re better.
DJ Pete Pop takes over Lasting Joy Brewery for six hours of all-vinyl favorites while the taproom, kitchen and grounds stay open for a long Labor Day weekend afternoon.
The setting does a lot of the work here: a beautifully designed brewery surrounded by farmland, plenty of room to settle in outside and a soundtrack that doesn’t require staring at another screen.
Why we recommend it: Good records, a beautiful setting and nowhere you particularly need to be next. Sometimes that’s enough.
Yes, That Is 100 Drums Playing Themselves
More than one hundred secondhand drums have been turned into one enormous self-playing instrument in Columbia County.
Dutch collective Touki Delphine brings the world premiere of SUPERDRUM X to PS21, connecting the drums into one giant mechanical sound installation.
Each evening, a different live drummer joins the machine, adding an entirely human pulse to something deliberately mechanical.
Why we recommend it: If somebody tells you there are more than 100 self-playing drums sitting in a field in Chatham, you investigate.
Plan Ahead
For one weekend, Poughkeepsie opens the doors to the places where the art actually gets made.
For One Weekend, Poughkeepsie Turns Into One Giant Art Crawl
If you haven’t spent an afternoon exploring Poughkeepsie’s art scene lately, September 12 and 13 may be the weekend to fix that.
Poughkeepsie Open Studios sends visitors through studios, galleries and creative spaces across the city, including the Trolley Barn, Cunneen-Hackett Arts Center, WomensWork.Art and independent artists’ workspaces.
Expect painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, furniture, mixed media and more, with artists opening the places where the work actually gets made.
Why we’re circling it: The Hudson Valley art story isn’t only Beacon and Hudson. Poughkeepsie is building something interesting, and this weekend lets you see a lot of it at once.
On Our Radar
The unmistakable voice at the center of Hiatus Kaiyote comes to Assembly for a night built around Nai Palm’s extraordinary phrasing, guitar playing and one of the most recognizable voices in modern soul. Cazeaux O.S.L.O. opens.
Thursday, September 17 · Doors 7 PM · Show 8 PM · Assembly, Kingston · Tickets and information
From September 9 through 13, designers, architects, artists and students gather at Bethel Woods to build experimental large-scale installations across the historic grounds.
This year’s theme, Staging, explores where architecture and performance meet.
September 9–13 · Bethel Woods Center for the Arts · Explore BuildFest 2026
Hidden inside a historic farmhouse outside Catskill is a tasting room devoted to something most of us probably don’t spend enough time thinking about: really good olive oil.
Pogliani Select works directly with small, multigenerational producers in Italy to bring single-estate extra virgin olive oils, aged balsamic vinegars and other regional specialties to the Hudson Valley.
235 Howard Hall Road, Catskill · Discover Pogliani Select
The family behind Rosie General has opened a year-round gelato shop directly across the street in Kingston’s Rondout, with scratch-made gelato and sorbet, sundaes, milkshakes, pie à la mode and other very good reasons to make a dessert stop.
5 Abeel Street, Kingston · Menu and details
Curated each week by the Radio Woodstock team.
This weekend’s assignment: look up, see a great show, eat the tomato while it still tastes like summer, listen to something on vinyl and investigate the field full of self-playing drums.
And if you find yourself somewhere in the Hudson Valley thinking how did I not know about this place?, send it our way.
Those are exactly the places we’re looking for.
We’ll see you next Thursday.