On our Fall Foliage trail
Day 1 – New York to Brattleboro
Anyone been here – or even heard of it ? There are so many little places we have stumbled upon to stay during our USA tours. Many are chosen just as a convenient location to stop along our travels. Adrienne does a lot of planning as to what we see during our days but the end location can often be just a nearby place “along the way”. And we are often pleasantly surprised with where we end up !
We left New York fairly early to drop Liam at JFK Airport for his flight back to LA and onward home. It is just under an hour drive to get there and early morning traffic didn’t help. However it covered roads we hadn’t covered before and for some time followed along the edge of New York harbour so the scenery was pretty good.
We bid farewell to Liam at the departure dropoff and then started our journey north. Our trip was mainly interstate driving – I-90 then I-91 – but in the 250 or so miles we covered we moved through four states again – New York to Connecticut to Massachucetts and over the border into Vermont.
We did have a couple of stops along the way. First we reached Danbury in Connecticut and stopped at Kent Falls State Park. It has a small covered bridge at the bottom of the park and a walk along a short pathway takes you to the water fall after which the park is named. Not huge falls but impressive all the same.
Next it was on to Massachucetts and a town called Stockbridge which was the home of renowned painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell. Rockwell became most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine in the US over nearly five decades. He also illustrated books such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. A very interesting stop – except the busloads had emptied out the cafe so we had to look elsewhare for a lunch stop ! So we stopped in the main town and bought sandwiches at a nice cafe.
It was then on to our stop for the next 2 nights in Brattleboro. Although Brattleboro is officially in Vermont it is right on the border with New Hampshire and we are actually over the river on the New Hampshire – very amusing when we cross back and forth over the river as Google announces “welcome to Vermont” or “welcome to New Hampshire” each time we cross 😂
The Riverside Hotel we are staying at is just great. We have a third floor room with a balcony looking straight down the river so we are self catering for the 2 nights – we sit on the balcony for our drinks and canapes and then dinner as well – just relaxing and very picturesque – the little boats, birdlife and squirrels have kept us very entertained !!
Day 2 – Lower Vermont Scenic Loop
Today we did a loop drive from Brattleboro through southern Vermont. First we headed out to the west of the state to Bennington. There are so many “scenic byways” in the state and we criss crossed a few of these along the way.
We then headed north toward Manchester and along the way we detoured onto a private toll road known as Mount Equinox. The mountain itself is the second tallest in the state. Much of the land was privately owned and is a retreat for the Carthusian order of monks. The road was built to the summit in 1947 and is the longest privately owned toll road in the US. It has some steep grades and rises over 3,800 feet in just over 5 miles. There are extensive views of the Adirondack Mountains, across Vermont in one direction and into New Hampshire the other. You can supposedly see Canada to the north but not sure how you tell !
Near Manchester in a town called Weston we visited the Vermont Country Store. In Vermont they seem to call what we would know as a “general store” a country store. So it is full of the usual “you name it we’ve got it” merchandise you would expect. This store was established in 1946 and is owned by the Orton family. It operated for many years with a mail order catalog. We also stopped for some lunch here at “Mildred’s Grill” – a nice maple glazed ham and salad roll and coffee.
We continued our drive through the mountains and towns with the colours starting to change and put on a good show. And after 48 states I finally got to stop for a school bus in one of the towns ! School buses have total right of way so when they stop – every one stops ! They stop in the middle of the road which stops the traffic behind the bus then they flip out their stop sign on the left of the bus and the oncoming traffic must stop. The kids get off the bus and then off you go when the stop sign retracts !
Back to our hotel and we again settled in to a quiet dinner and drinks on our nice balcony – so relaxing. Though we have certainly noticed how quickly the temperatures have dropped. In New York we were getting mid 20 degree days and now only mid teens – and cold nghts !
We even had a fly past of geese heading off to their fall feeding grounds.
Next, further north in Vermont