For a Great Museum Road Trip, Get In an Empire State of Mind

New York City becomes unspeakably humid. To afford a Sag Harbor quarter-share, you now need an I.M.F. loan. In the Hudson Valley you must do battle with Brooklyn transplants cosplaying locavore Marie-Antoinette.

But there is a solution to summer in New York: Keep driving! In upstate New York — and we can debate the terminology; the citizens of Buffalo are convinced they do not live there — the holiday crowds are thinner but the attractions are just as fine. It has cultural institutions rivaling those in the five boroughs, and rambling Letchworth State Park may be the state’s most spectacular natural wonder. New York even has an upstate governor, Kathy Hochul, for the first time in a century — although, after her congestion pricing U-turn, her constituents in Manhattan have some thoughts about Buffalo rule.

This Labor Day, then, might it be time for a northern campaign? Recently I rented a zippy little car (actually it was a normcore sedan), breathed in the fresh air (actually it was a torrential rainstorm) and blasted the tunes (actually it was the BBC World Service) on a three-day cultural jaunt from the Finger Lakes to the Ontario frontier.

In the western stretches of New York are four of the best museums in the Empire State, not to mention some significant historical homes. You can stop at the house of William S. Seward, President Lincoln’s secretary of state, or at that of the women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, outside Seneca Falls.

Any of the museums below is worth a visit, but you can conjoin all four into a prime weekend of upstate culture, working southeast to northwest, and washed down with some good Empire State white wine. (Although, fair warning, three out of four are closed on Labor Day; the Corning Museum of Glass is open.)