About an hour from the George Washington Bridge.
It is the first question almost everyone asks, so that is the plain answer before anything else. The rest of this is what the hour is like, when not to drive it, and whether you can skip the car altogether — which you can, just about, and probably should not.
That number is the entire proposition. Close enough that a Friday evening is still a whole evening rather than a write-off. Far enough that the city stops following you: not a longer version of the suburbs, but actual hills, actual water, actual dark at night.
The first twenty minutes are the worst of it
You cross the bridge and for a while it is unremarkable. Then the density thins, the Highlands take over — low ridges, reservoirs, hardwood forest — and the road starts to feel like it is going somewhere rather than through somewhere.
The last stretch runs along the water. It is an unusually pretty final ten minutes for a drive that began in Manhattan, and it does most of the work of putting you in a different frame of mind before you have parked.
One small thing in your favor: the George Washington Bridge is tolled eastbound only. Coming up costs nothing. You settle up on the way home, when you care less.
Leaving at the wrong hour costs you more than the distance
Friday between four and seven is the bad window, and the bridge is the bottleneck rather than anything at our end. Leave before three or after eight and you save a genuine half hour, often more. Sunday afternoons run the same way in reverse, with the pinch between three and six.
If your dates are flexible at all, a Thursday arrival and a Monday departure is the best trick we know. Four nights rather than two, roughly half the traffic on both drives, and a Friday morning on the lake with nobody else on the water.
Pull up the directions before you leave the highway
Cell service in the Highlands is good but not uniform, and the last few turns are the sort that are obvious in daylight and much less so at nine at night in the rain.
We send the exact address, the door code and the parking notes with your booking confirmation, so nothing has to be solved in the driveway with a phone held above your head.
You can come without a car, and we would still tell you to drive
NJ Transit’s 196 and 197 run from the Port Authority to stops on Greenwood Lake Turnpike, in Hewitt itself, which surprises people who assume this is unreachable without a car. Budget close to three hours door to door, and read the timetable properly: the express pattern is built around weekday commuters and weekend service thins out.
The problem is not getting here. It is that the lake, the trailheads and the valley towns are all a short drive from one another and nothing links them, so without a car you are committed to whichever one the bus left you at.
Do not count on filling the gaps with a taxi app either. Rideshare technically covers this area, but pickups out here are slow and unpredictable, which is a poor thing to learn at eleven at night. If you are staying without a car and plan to eat out, book a local car service in advance with a set time.
And if you are renting for the weekend, pick the car up on the way out of the city rather than paying garage rates for the days you are away. It is a small saving that people routinely forget to make.
However you come, the last mile is the same. The turnpike bends down toward the water, the trees give out, and the lake is in front of you. An hour ago you were on the George Washington Bridge.