A View of Vermont

Vermont is known as the green state, even though it's currently yellow, orange, red and brown. It's a rural (and wilderness) paradise, replete with pretty wooden houses, covered bridges and lots of little farms. These farms produce the icing on the cake that is Vermont - maple syrup, cheese and ice-cream. We woke up in Brattleboro to fog and cold - half a degree above freezing.

The View from our Motel 6 room

We simply drove for the day, heading north, through the countryside, past covered bridges, alongside scenic lookouts, up to the base of the mountains and over spectacular gorges.

A covered bridge

The view from Hogback Mountain

The Killington Gondola

Quechee Gorge

What's most impressive is that, with the exception of Killington, none of these stops were planned - we literally just came across these places on our route. We did, however, make a planned stop at Billings Farm, a working dairy farm that was established in the 19th century.

Apple Varieties at Billings Farm

Daniel and I agreed that we could quite happily live in Vermont, or at least visit for a season. The question is which season - hiking in Summer, snow sports in Winter... Decisions, decisions.

Connecticut Countryside

Boston, Newport and New Haven were great, but it's the countryside we really came to New England to see, and with good reason. We left New Haven early and began the drive north through the rural parts of Connecticut in search of fall foliage at its peak. Sunday brunch was had in the picturesque town of Litchfield, in the northwestern part of CT, which is apparently a weekend destination for rich New Yorkers who have holiday houses in the hills. More or less unable to get lost because we have a GPS, we've made a point of driving as many back roads as possible so as to try and get a real taste of the places we're passing through.

A River in CT

Daniel and Our Fully-Sick Maxima (with NY plates)

Back Roads of Rural Connecticut

Choosing routes other than the Interstates and Highways yields many rewards, and not just in the form of spectacular scenery and covered bridges (more on them later). You also stumble across some wonderful little villages. For example, Gaylordsville, Connecticut. Seriously.

The Gaylordsville Candy Shop

Don't you just love their local candy store? It appears that whoever runs it has a sense of humour, or at least I hope they do... After spending a couple of hours looping aimlessly through the countryside we ended up in Hartford, the state's capital. Our true destination was the Mark Twain House and Museum - Twain (born Samuel Clemens) lived in Hartford from 1874 to 1891. He had the house built for him and his family, and it's actually quite ugly - apparently everyone in Hartford at the time thought so too.

Mark Twain House

On the way out of Hartford we passed its Occupy movement of a measly six or seven tents camped in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere next to a freeway on-ramp. They didn't look as though they were making an impact on anything, but one can only try I suppose. As it was getting late we cheated and drove up to Brattleboro, Vermont, through Massachusetts, on the interstate. It was dark when we got in, so we found a fantastic little restaurant for a tasty dinner of steak and pasta then called it a day. A good one. 

Yale and Pizza

We're travelling well together and beginning to master the art of compromise. In New Haven, Connecticut, I got another Ivy League university, and Daniel got ... pizza. Nice juxtaposition, no? In fact, these are about the only things that New Haven is renowned for - we got the feeling the rest of it was a bit of a dump.

As most Yale students and alumni will tell you, Yale University is far superior to Harvard. As a somewhat objective outsider, I agree. If I was to go to any university in America this would be it, and not just because it has a superb medieval studies center. Most of the campus feels medieval, even though the bulk of it was built at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The architect and I would have got along like a house on fire. His neo-gothic buildings have fake cracks in the windows. Some of the glass panes are coloured, so as to look as if they have been replaced. The roof tiles were buried under Long Island Sound for two years before being laid, and he poured acid down the stone walls to make them look weathered. Cool guy.

Yale University

Colour at Yale

Back in the day you weren't considered much of a neo-gothic architect until you'd built a cathedral. Yale didn't need one, so he built them a library. Except it's a cathedral. But, cathedrals weren't worth their chop unless they'd been though hell (think the dissolution of the monasteries, world wars etc). So, Mr. Architect finished the building, then took to the top of it with a blowtorch. Seriously - it's covered in black scorch marks. There are also a number of statue-less statue nooks, suggesting that the statues have been plundered when in fact there were never any there to begin with. It honestly has to be the coolest library on the planet, but we didn't get any photos of it. Idiots.

If New Haven does a good university, it does an even better pizza. Locals will tell you that Connecticut pizza is better than NYC pizza - we'll give you our judgement on that towards the end of our trip. There's a few specific pizza institutions in New Haven, and on the recommendation of a local we went to Sally's Apizza. Luckily we got there early and only had to wait about twenty minutes for a table - by the time we finished up, there was a line around the corner. The walls inside were covered in photos of and letters from famous people (i.e. Frank Sinatra) that have eaten there since Sally's opened in the 1930s. Daniel and I shared a pepperoni, though I use the term shared loosely since I only had two slices of the behemoth below.

Before

After

Needless to say there was nearly half a pizza left, which Daniel enjoyed for breakfast the next day. Our waiter at Sally's, Lorenzo, was also our entertainment for the evening. The guy had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian rock music and intermittently gave us clues as to his favourite band of all time. At the end of our pizza we were still stumped - when he named the band as "The Church" and we proclaimed we'd never heard of them, he told us he was going to revoke our passports and kicked us out of the restaurant. Almost. He and another waiter were asking us about our trip and seemed immensely jealous, telling us it was the trip of a lifetime and something that all Americans should do, but never would. We're getting that reaction a lot. Lucky bastards.