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Frommer’s Star Ratings System
Every hotel, restaurant, and attraction listed in this guide has been ranked for quality and value. Here’s what the stars mean:
| Recommended | |
| Highly Recommended | |
| A must! Don't miss! |
AN IMPORTANT NOTE
The world is a dynamic place. Hotels change ownership, restaurants hike their prices, museums alter their opening hours, and buses and trains change their routings. And all of this can occur in the several months after our authors have visited, inspected, and written about, these hotels, restaurants, museums, and transportation services. Though we have made valiant efforts to keep all our information fresh and up-to-date, some few changes can inevitably occur in the periods before a revised edition of this guidebook is published. So please bear with us if a tiny number of the details in this book have changed. Please also note that we have no responsibility or liability for any inaccuracy or errors or omissions, or for inconvenience, loss, damage, or expenses suffered by anyone as a result of assertions in this guide.
On the western bluffs of Newport, Rhode Island, Castle Hill Lighthouse guards the entrance to Narragansett Bay.
CONTENTS
Bennington, Manchester & Environs
Brattleboro & the Southern Green Mountains
Killington & Rutland
Middlebury
The Mad River Valley
Montpelier, Barre & Waterbury
Stowe
Burlington
The Northeast Kingdom
3Planning Your Trip to New England
Ready for an Atlantic sunrise over Tenants Harbor, Maine.
ABOUT THE AUTHORs
Kim Knox Beckius is a Connecticut-based travel writer who has hugged a baby moose, tasted 38 different whoopie pies in one sitting, and sent hundreds of free fall leaves in the mail to autumn lovers around the world. She is a Yankee Magazine Contributing Editor, owner of EverythingNewEngland.com, New England Expert for TripSavvy.com (formerly About.com) and the author of seven books including Backroads of New England and New England’s Historic Homes & Gardens. She lives in the Hartford area.
Leslie Brokaw has worked on more than a dozen Frommer’s Guides to Québec and New England. She is an editor for MIT Sloan Management Review and teaches at Emerson College. She and her family live outside of Boston.
Brian Kevin is the editor in chief of Down East magazine and has written for Outside, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, Audubon and other magazines. His work has been recognized or anthologized in Best Food Writing, Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing and he’s the author of The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America. He lives in Hope, Maine.
Herbert Bailey Livesey has written about food and travel for over 40 years, authoring or contributing to Frommer’s Montreal & Quebec City, Frommer’s Europe, and Frommer’s New England. In addition, he wrote and revised five guidebooks in the earlier American Express series, which were translated into 11 languages. Scores of his articles have been published in Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Playboy, New York, and Yankee.
Laura Reckford has been exploring and writing about Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, as well as other parts of New England, for more than 20 years. She is the founder and CEO of Cape Cod Wave, an online magazine covering the culture and character of Cape Cod. She is also the executive director of the Falmouth Art Center. She resides in Falmouth, MA.
Barbara Radcliffe Rogers is co-author of seven guidebooks to Italy, three to Spain, and several others covering Europe, Atlantic Canada, and New England. She writes regularly for Global Traveler Magazine and other magazines, newspapers, and websites. Her taste for travel began when she moved to Verona, Italy, soon after graduating from Boston University, and she has since visited every country in Western Europe, and much of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Barbara currently lives in New Hampshire. Wherever she is, she’s likely to be skiing in the winter and kayaking in the summer and discovering new flavors for her blog, Worldbite.
Award-winning travel writer Bill Scheller is a 30-year Vermont resident. His books include America: A History in Art; Colonial New England on Five Shillings a Day; and, with his wife Kay, Best Vermont Drives. Among his more than 300 published articles are numerous features in Yankee magazine on his adopted state. He lives in Randolph, Vermont.
Stillman Rogers is a travel writer and photographer, co-author of guidebooks to Portugal, Italy, and Spain’s Canary Islands, as well as the eastern U.S. and Canada. His photographs have been published in books, magazines, and regularly on Global Traveler’s family travel website, WhereverFamily. He writes about destinations and skiing and has a monthly newspaper travel column. His first foreign travel was after graduating from Harvard, when he was stationed in Italy for 3 years; Italy still remains one of his favorite subjects for photography.
Erin Trahan is an arts journalist who specializes in film, TV, and travel. She is a regular contributor to WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, and she teaches at Emerson College. She has written extensively for Frommer’s Travel Guides. Erin lives in Marblehead, MA.
1
Vermont
By William Scheller
Vermont’s rolling hills, shaggy peaks, grazing cows, sugar maples, spectacular fall foliage, and quaint towns give it a distinct sense of place. This state is filled with the dairy farms, dirt roads, and small-scale enterprises that bring joy to the hearts of back-road travelers. And the towns are home to an intriguing mix of old-time Vermonters, back-to-the-landers who showed up in VW buses in the 1960s and never left (many got involved with municipal affairs or put down business roots—think Ben & Jerry); and newer, moneyed arrivals from New York or Boston who came to ski or stay at B&Bs and ended up buying second homes—more than a few of which ended up becoming first homes.
The place captures a sense of America as it once was—because here it still is. Vermonters share a sense of community, and they still respect the ideals of thrift and parsimony above those of commercialism. (It took years for Walmart to get approval to build its first big-box store