Are you in New York City, or more upstate NY? (the "how I'd get there" question made me curious. In Ohio, 8 miles is just a 10 minute drive.)

Glad to hear you're going to try backpacking. It's great exercise, and a pleasant antidote to the craziness of our "normal" lives. As you have questions, feel free to ask; if it's something that you're just too embarrassed to post about (and we all have such things, from time to time), send one of us a PM. We can mislead you with the best of them.

If you haven't already read it, pick up a copy of Colin Fletcher's Complete Walker IV. It's not really a beginner's book (though, come to think of it, the original edition was the first book I read, after my first Scout overnighter with my son, so maybe it's not such a bad starting place.) Your first pass through should involve a pretty thorough reading of the Prefaces and first chapter or two and the last chapter, on general aspects. Then, pick and choose your gear topics. He approaches it as walking with your house on your back, and organizes the material on gear and specific techniques accordingly: Kitchen (stoves, food considerations, cooking techniques, and fire); Bedroom (sleeping bags, sleeping pads, tents, tarps, and how to use them - also an excellent description of a routine day on the trail); and so forth. As you go through the gear chapters, you might skim all the details on makes and models - much of it is 3 years or more out of date, unavoidably - and go back to that as you begin to make gear decisions. The parts to read are about the purpose of gear, design features of good gear, and how to make the gear work for you.

In the early part of the book, there's also an excellent discussion of the evolution of gear and how lightweight fits into the overall world of the backpacker. The book is actually a conversation between Fletcher and his co-author Chip Rawlings; Fletcher is more of a traditionalist willing to selectively use lighter gear, while Rawlings is more of a lightweight/ultralight/experimenter kind of backpacker. It sounds like it might be confusing, but it really seems to work and provides a lot of good information from a couple of points of view.

It's really a great read.