Heading to Vermont

While planning our trip north to attend my aunt’s memorial on Oct. 21, we decided to add a few days and take a little side trip to New England. The purpose being twofold. One is the obvious, it being autumn and New England landscapes are legendary for their fine and brilliant colors.

The other purpose is to have a look at the options for a short summer break. A place with some mountains and cool deep woodlands to escape the oppressive Delmarva heat and humidity. And equally important, some place with bike trails for the boys to play on. 

Autumn has just barely started in our area on the Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania border. Most of the landscape is still thickly green, though it has faded from a rich deep green to something more faded and less intense. The first apperance of some change unfolding can be seen on the occasional tree. Up high, up where the sun’s first kiss of daylight on the tallest branches leaves behind a bit of color on the tree tops.

As we roll along northward through New Jersey, we can see much more of autumn’s dressing on the trees along the highway and the still low in the sky morning sun creating many sparking light patterns on the water as we pass rivers, ponds, and lakes. The crisp air here is surely a harbinger of more to come as we continue our trek northward.

The corn that remains in the fields, which appears here and there in the breaks of trees and tall feathery topped grasses that grow along the rivers and ditches have turned all tawny. The sumac trees, which seem to just blend in and go mostly unnoticed during the summer months, leaves have turned a brilliant red and orange and their berries the deepest maroon almost looking black. While at home, the goldenrod and asters are in full bloom, here along the highway, the goldenrod seems just to be starting, whereas the Aster look puffed with seed and they seem nearly finished. 

As we made our turn on the Garden State Parkway we saw a warning sign, after we had already gotten on to the roadway, which says no trucks. This caused us a little concern. While technically we’re not a truck, those signs sometimes mean there are low overhead bridges on the route. Then, a bit further down the road we see another sign, low overhead on shoulders. So we keep our course on the middle lane. As it turns out, the bridges are marked on both the left and right sides –and are not necessarily the same height on each side. Most are about 13′ 5″ feet high. So, we were ok with the RV being 12′ 2″. 

A dramatic change in landscape occurs shortly after crossing the border into NY state. The taller hills and mountains with their stark granite faces looking outward and treelined shoulders greet us. Welcome to NY. The deeper curvy folds of the land’s contours offer the promise of hidden valleys which can just be made out below, at an overpass or when there is a break in the mountain line. Hello Catskill Mountains. It’s starting to feel like I am home again.

Amazingly, the autumn colors have not progressed much more than ours has. 

As we traversed northward along route 87 though the Catskills, some dark heavy clouds starred rolling in and hiding the blue sky from our view. Occasionally, there would be a break and some brilliant golden light would leak through the clouds and shed light on various parts of the landscape. A portion of a mountain, a house in a valley, or a river below, only to be shrouded again a few moments later. 

As we get closer to Albany, there seems to be a bit more color in the trees. It still seems less then my childhood memories recall for this time in October. 

We have noticed that a lot of trees have suffered a lot of leaf loss due to the stress from the climate changing as ours have. 

We arrived at our site which is located inside the Green Mountain State Park in Vermont for the evening. There was a sporadic drizzle as we set up our camp. Behind us in the north-west, the sky was fulled with dramatic deeply layered gray clouds of varying shades of light gray to nearly black and through the front window a bright sky blue with white clouds above and not-so-foreboding quickly moving gray puffy clouds below. All in all, a pretty standard northern autumn early evening sky.

We unhooked the bikes from the car in a cold drizzle and chilly breeze. Paul headed up to the top of Prospect Mountain and I went into the warm RV to get our dinner started. 

As is often the case, it wasn’t long before he discovered an abandoned building. At the summit, he found the end of the line for an old ski lift operation. The overhead cable was gone, but metal girders still marked an overgrown clearing down the other side of the mountain. The large return bullwheel was intact and next to that was the upper terminal building. The one-room building was just large enough for a wood burning stove and some benches for a handful of people. An old window frame was suspended above the stove as a drying rack. A coffee cup and a spatula were the only signs of creature comforts. The building was uninsulated, unless you count the spray foam inserted between the board and batten siding. 

I am guessing this is pretty much it for today’s events. 

Tomorrow we head for Lincoln, New Hampshire, if the overnight weather clears as projected, we’ll be taking a longer more scenic route via 100 through the Green Mountains for a ways before we cut over to the main road to Lincoln.