I mentioned a while back that I want someday to walk Vermont’s Long Trail from Canada south to the Massachusetts line, beginning in late September and following the autumn colors south. I’ve just stumbled across the website of someone who did just that last fall. Great site, great pix, and I think a great representation of the trail. Except for the rain, it’s quite different from anything in the UK. It has something of the “green tunnel” nature of the Appalachian Trail, but parts of it are beautifully bucolic, and its northern half is steep, tough, relatively untraveled, roughly maintained, and frequently pops above treeline. Most people walk it northbound, and so are fit by the time they hit the big mountains. Of course, we walked the TMB backwards, too.
On the Northern New England theme, we once hosted a Danish exchange student, and took her north one weekend to walk into Carter Notch Hut in New Hampshire. Somewhere in southern Vermont, she said from the backseat, “if we were in Denmark, we’d be out of the country by now.” (We miss you, Weezie!) On the other hand, a workmate newly in from California once decided that an inn in southern Vermont might be a nice spot to take his wife for a romantic anniversary (or was it a birthday?) weekend. I gave him general driving directions, and off they went. They crossed the line from Connecticut into Massachusetts, then about an hour later, came to the “Entering Vermont” sign. He turned to his wife and said, “Look. Some wiseguy moved the state line sign way down here.”
New England: Huge to a Dane, tiny to a boy from Long Beach.
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