The Hudson Valley and West Point Before or After a New York Cruise

A cruise rarely lets you choose the weekday, so read the grid from your end.

Ships that sail on a Sunday leave Saturday for the trip, and Saturday is the one day a Manhattan return gets hard. Coming off the ship on a Monday or a Friday is the easy case.

Tuesday rules out Storm King, and Tuesday to Thursday rules out Dia — plan West Point, Bear Mountain or the outlets those days, not the art.

Manhattan is the short start for every stop. Red Hook and Bayonne add roughly 7 to 13 miles to each trip by the same estimate — 10 to 20 minutes on paper, more in real traffic.

Two stops in a day is realistic — three is a long one, and Dia closes at 5.

Pair the stops by bank: Dia sits across the river in Beacon, and the other four are on the west side.

Dia plus Storm King means a river crossing, not a detour.

Since March 2026 the Army checks the ID of every visitor 18 or older at West Point’s gates, and it asks for a REAL ID-compliant card.

A passport works — the one you packed for the cruise.

Without a REAL ID card or a passport, the Army’s page lists a primary-plus-secondary ID combination instead — read it before you drive 50 miles to the gate.

Foreign visitors need their passport plus an escort who holds a military credential — line that up before the day, not at the gate.

The visitor center is at 2107 New South Post Road, Highland Falls, open daily 6 AM to 6 PM. West Point Tours runs a 1-hour-15 tour from $22 an adult and a cemetery tour from $25, both from the visitor center.

Book the tour if you want the grounds; the visitor center is the start either way.

At a $50 rate, the day comes to about $134 for two from a Manhattan desk before the toll back into the city, and $56 of that is admission you’d pay however you arrived.

Four of you push it to about $190, admission included — roughly $48 each.

Switch the pick-up to New Jersey and two of you land near $132 — a couple of dollars, not a reason to cross the river.

We can’t tell you whether the bus package beats the car, because Coach USA didn’t show its price to us. Type its fare into the row beside the car and the answer is yours.

A family of two adults and two teenagers pays about $92 at Storm King on a weekend, against $80 on a weekday — a weekday saves $12 before you’ve touched the car.

Bear Mountain’s fee is per car, collected 8 to 5 on weekends and holidays and 8 to 4 on weekdays, all year.

Dia’s cheapest ticket is the child’s. Its parking, though, is limited — the train may serve a family better than the car here.

It’s tempting to take the train north and rent there, away from the city.

It barely works. Orange, Dutchess, Putnam, Rockland and Westchester are all inside the same metropolitan district as the city, so a rental picked up there still pays the 6% supplemental tax — our reading, from the county list the city’s taxi commission prints for the same district.

What changes is the local sales tax. The state’s rate table puts Orange County at 8.125% and most of Westchester at 8.375%, against the city’s 8.875%.

Stack the two 6% rental taxes on top and an Orange County pick-up carries about 20.125%, Westchester about 20.375%, by our arithmetic.

That’s half a point to three-quarters of a point less than the city — about $0.25 to $0.38 a day on a $50 car, not a reason to ride a train north.

New Jersey is the real difference, and the hub’s tax table sets it out.

Dia is the easy one without a car — the train gets you within half a mile, and parking at the museum is limited anyway.

Storm King’s bus package bundles the ride and the ticket. For one or two people it’s the option to price first.

West Point and Bear Mountain are car trips, as far as the pages we read go.

Skip the rental if Dia is your only stop.

Buy Storm King tickets before anything else; its own page calls pre-purchase “essential to guarantee admission and parking”.

Then match the pick-up to your terminal. A Manhattan desk for Piers 88 and 90, Downtown Brooklyn for Red Hook, Jersey City or Newark for Cape Liberty.

Last, check that the return desk is open on the day the car comes back — the grid at the top already did half of that.