Things to Do in Hillsdale

For more than 75 years, Olinville Arms Co. has accommodated New York's law-enforcement team with high-quality uniforms, equipment, and shooting practice space. Training classes enlighten students on the intricacies of handling firearms and performing security with classes on topics including armed service, cuffing, and baton use. To ensure clean and comfortable environs, a high-tech air-filtration system funnels gun smoke and profane one-liners away from patrons down range. In addition to safety and skills courses, Olinville's staff revamps outmoded firearms with gunsmithing services such as barrel installation, re-bluing services, and general repairs.

Registered yoga teacher and founder Giovanna Rogow has been helping practitioners from all walks of life foster connections between the mind, body, and spirit in Zomoti's newly renovated studio. Her team of experienced instructors, all of whom are certified at at least the 200-hour level, leads 10 different class styles, teaching strengthening power yoga, Vinyasa flow fundamentals, and Zomoti soothing yoga, designed to relax the body and mind with meditative postures and comforting hugs from supportive mats.

Erica Garcia bends over backwards to accommodate her students, whether organizing girls-night-out-style yoga parties in her intimate studio or tending to uninitiated students in yoga flow or fundamentals sessions. With signature humor, she spurs classes on, helping them push past asana plateaus in blended classes that include styles such as Vinyasa, Hatha, Iyengar, and Ashtanga. To create a serene atmosphere, Erica leads healing postures in a warm room that glows with flickering candlelight and resonates with motivating music ideal for lending an upbeat tone to ghost stories.

Branching off from a popular bike-tour company in New York City, Bike the Big Capital enlists DC native and seasoned guide Pat to marshal riders through the hallowed streets and monuments of the capital city. Bringing together self-propelled transportation and the history of the city's monuments and people, each tour weaves through neighborhoods as groups discover areas that harbor hidden treasures out in the open. While riding through changing landscapes, tours delve beneath the surface of each popular and little-known site visited, and historical information makes way for modern marvels as asphalt winds toward blooming green spaces.

When guiding cyclists around town, Pat teams up with a fellow history buff for the company's six-hour tours, each delving into a different facet of American history. The 10-mile National Mall Cherry Blossom Tour departs only during March and April, when the two cherry trees planted by first lady Taft and their blushing peers bloom like adolescents on an all-weeds diet.

Tour A, the American Identities Tour, leads pedalers through 14 miles of tree-fringed streets while guides narrate the backstory of passing monuments and the infamous Ford Theater, where John Wilkes Booth made his escape from unreasonably high ticket prices. During the evening, Tour B shows off 14 miles of DC in the moonlight across the historical Potomac River bridges, toward a nature preserve, and with a stop at the spooky outdoor staircase made famous by The Exorcist.

Get America Tours's knowledgeable guides escort groups of sightseers on more than 20 extended and mini tours. Tours journey to places like New York City and the Grand Canyon on 1- to 11-day jaunts taken at a comfortable pace, allowing patrons to hit the area's highlights and spend time soaking up their new setting. Highly trained guides share a wealth of information about history, local gems, and cultural tradition with their tour members. Some guides, able to speak Spanish and German, are also trained as multilingual emissaries. Passengers are ferried across the United States and Canada in either buses, vans, or minivans, depending on the number of passengers, ensuring that tours are never cancelled due to a lack of passengers or an overabundance of giant stuffed animals.

Like mounting an HDTV on a terra-cotta warrior, Excel Yoga blends the ancient and the modern, shepherding students of all experience levels through serene yoga sessions, sultry belly-dancing lessons, and high-energy kickboxing and boot-camp fitness classes. A sense of community weaves throughout the studio, from the eco-friendly bamboo flooring to courses that bring families into the fitness fold, such as Kids Yoga and Mommy & Me Yoga.

Beyond its slate of exercise classes, workshops deepen yogis’ relationship with various aspects of yoga. The Anatomy Workshop, for example, blends discussion and practice to explore how certain poses can relieve physical disorders. Excel Yoga even cultivates its own fleet of enthusiastic instructors through intensive teacher training that outfits prospective pedagogues with the knowledge, poses, and sweat-proof grade books they need to lead classes.