Roomer

“There's a deer standing in the median of Route 17, completely unbothered by the traffic, like it's waiting for a table.”

The drive up from the city takes just under two hours if you dodge the Friday exodus, which you won't. Somewhere past Wurtsboro the strip malls thin out and the Sullivan County hills start doing their thing — green and rolling and empty in a way that makes you forget you were sitting in Holland Tunnel fumes ninety minutes ago. Monticello itself doesn't prepare you. There's a Stewart's shop, a few shuttered storefronts from the town's older life, and then Resorts World Drive appears like a punchline: a wide, freshly paved road curving up toward something enormous and very new. The Kartrite sits at the top of it, a sprawling modern compound sharing its hillside with the Resorts World Catskills casino next door. You park, you haul bags, and before you've found the lobby a kid in a swimsuit runs past you barefoot on the concrete, already screaming about the slides. That's your orientation.

This stretch of the Catskills used to be the Borscht Belt — Grossinger's, the Concord, Kutsher's — places where New York families spent entire summers doing comedy shows and cannonballs. Most of those resorts are gone now, replaced by forest or by developments that never quite landed. The Kartrite is, in some ways, the newest attempt at the same old promise: bring the kids, forget the city, get wet. Except this version involves an 80,000-square-foot indoor waterpark kept at a permanent 84 degrees Fahrenheit, which means it works in January as well as July.

Eighty-four degrees, year-round

The waterpark is the reason this place exists, and it knows it. Walk through the main entrance and you're hit with a wall of humid, chlorinated air that smells exactly like every public pool you've ever loved as a child. There are four main slides — the Nor'easter is the headline act, a steep drop-launch tube that sends you through darkness before spitting you out into a catch pool — plus a lazy river, a wave pool, a smaller splash area for toddlers, and a surfing simulator called the Kartrite Flowrider that teenagers monopolize all day. The whole thing is enclosed under a massive atrium roof with skylights, so the light inside is strange and diffused, like being inside a greenhouse that happens to have waterslides.

The rooms are designed around the assumption that everything you own will be damp by checkout. Tile floors in the entryway, hooks everywhere, a bathroom with enough towel racks for a family of five. Ours was a suite with a separate kids' area — bunk beds behind a divider, a mini-fridge, a microwave. The beds are fine, firm enough. The view from the balcony is either the parking lot or the hills depending on your luck; we got the hills, which at dusk turn the kind of purple that makes you briefly consider moving upstate. The walls are not thick. You will hear the family next door. You will hear the ice machine. You will hear someone's kid having a meltdown at 10 PM and feel a grim solidarity.

Food options inside the resort lean functional. There's a place called Biergarten that does decent burgers and serviceable nachos, and a grab-and-go spot for coffee and pastries that charges resort prices — expect to pay ‏7 US$ for a muffin without blinking. The better move is to drive ten minutes into Monticello proper and eat at Yoli's, a Dominican spot on Broadway where the mofongo is real and the portions assume you haven't eaten in two days. Nobody at the resort will tell you about Yoli's. I'm telling you about Yoli's.

“The Catskills have been promising New Yorkers an escape for a century. The Kartrite just added waterslides to the pitch.”

What the Kartrite gets right is managing expectations. This is not a boutique hotel. This is not a wilderness retreat. This is a place where you bring children and let them exhaust themselves in warm water for two days while you float the lazy river with a look on your face that could be peace or could be dissociation — hard to tell, doesn't matter. The staff are young, mostly local, and generally patient in a way that suggests they've seen every possible tantrum. There's an arcade on the lower level that will vacuum quarters out of your pockets, and a small outdoor pool area that opens in summer. A spa exists, theoretically, though I never made it past the waterpark entrance.

One odd detail: there's a massive mural in the lobby hallway depicting what looks like an abstract Catskills landscape, all greens and golds, and someone has placed a single potted fern directly in front of it, partially blocking the bottom-left corner. It's been there long enough that the fern has grown into the frame. Nobody has moved it. It feels intentional and accidental at the same time, which is a decent summary of the whole place.

Driving back down the hill

Sunday morning, the parking lot empties in waves. Families load minivans with that specific post-vacation silence — kids asleep before the engine starts, adults doing the math on tolls versus the Palisades. Driving back down Resorts World Drive, you pass the deer again, or a different deer, still standing in the same median. Monticello looks different in morning light, quieter, the old storefronts catching sun they don't get in the afternoon. If you're heading south, stop at the Mobil station on Route 17B for coffee that costs a third of what you paid inside the resort. It's better, too.

Rooms at the Kartrite start around ‏250 US$ per night on weekdays and climb past ‏400 US$ on summer weekends — waterpark access is included, which is the whole calculation. For a family of four doing two nights, it's roughly the cost of a day at a Manhattan theme attraction, except here you get a bed, a balcony, and the sound of the Catskills doing absolutely nothing outside your window.