The daily grind was starting to feel endless. I couldn’t believe it had been almost a year since we’d been back from our last trip, and I hadn’t been away for longer than 2 days since. We had less than a week available for holidays, so we looked at our options within a close range to Toronto. Having been to very little of the North East US, we decided to hop in the car and take a scenic drive through the Adirondacks to Vermont.
After a quick stop in Buffalo for a taste of the worlds first Buffalo wings, we headed east in the dark, stopping to sleep before we hit an area already awash with beautiful fall colours. We aren’t exactly ‘leafers’, we do live in Canada so we aren’t new to the beauties of autumn, but we were hoping for a shock of colour amongst a new setting.
As soon as we entered Adirondack Park, we started seeing bursts of red, auburn and yellow, amongst the still-green trees. We stopped to take some pictures but when we wound our way toward the tops of mountains, hillsides all turned to fire and we couldn’t stop commenting on how beautiful everything was.
After a quick ferry on Lake Chaplain, we departed New York and entered Vermont, where we made our way to Burlington. One of the coolest cities we’ve been to, Burlington is the largest city in Vermont, but with only about 42 thousand people, 3 colleges an assortment of boutique shops and restaurants and a super liberal, environmental atmosphere, it feels anything but an average ‘big’ city.
We picked up more than a few grocery bags full of local food at the main grocery store in Burlington, where the amount of local and organic food completely outnumbered generic brands. The quality and care in that grocery store made us hopeful for a way of life we didn’t know people led! Excited to taste our bag of goodies, we GPS’ed our way to a cabin we rented in the Charlotte countryside.
When we travel for extended periods we tend to use hostels as our accommodations, this time, however, we found an artistic little hideaway that was the perfect spot to spend our short holiday.
The cabin is on the banks of Lewis Creek where, in the morning Nick threw some casts for Trout, and in the evening, we cooked our meals while it poured rain outside. The rustic interior was the perfect environment to kick back and enjoy some classic comfort food and a few bottles of wine. It was only a short drive into Burlington and to Stowe, a historic character filled city which is famous for the ski resorts like Smuggler’s Notch Resort and Stoweflake Mountain Resort.
After driving through Vermont we noticed that despite the colours in New York, Vermont itself hadn’t gotten to it’s peak yet and if this was your sole reason for traveling in the area, It would be best to check out some of the foliage reports online.
Feeling relaxed from all the fresh air, we loaded up the car, glad we weren’t headed back home just yet. We were driving North to Montréal to gorge ourselves on some of Montréal’s fatty delicacies and lounge around in the coffee shops around the Plateau District.
