Expert Advice and Smart Choices (Gold Guides)

Destination New England


If New England didn't exist, Currier & Ives might have had to invent it. Its immaculate village greens, brilliant white clapboard churches, covered bridges, and lighthouses are national emblems, along with the seasons themselves. But New England is much more than a colossal picture postcard: The historic sites witnessed events chronicled in classrooms across the country, the antiques shops and
discount malls are legendary, and urban pleasures flourish, from lively restaurants to the performing arts. New England is a pleasure trove -- if you know where to look.


Maine


Maine's rugged splendor sets it apart from its more pastoral neighbors. The state is vast -- New England's Big Sky Country. Lush pine and spruce forests extend from a few miles inland all the way to the Canadian border, a ragged carpet of dark green punctuated by sparkling ponds and lakes where vacationers get cozy in rustic summer homes and generations of children have gobbled s'mores at camp. The streams that connect some of these clear blue waters, among them the celebrated Allagash
River, attract canoeists from far and wide. But for most travelers Maine's coast is its big draw. Lobster pots and buoys, monuments to a key coastal pleasure, stand at the ready up and down the shore at Boothbay Harbor and beyond. They're a constant reminder of what's cooking for dinner:  sweet, sea-tangy lobster at sardine prices.


New Hampshire


The state has a little of everything that defines New England: a seacoast around the historic city of Portsmouth, many covered bridges, and seasonal pleasures, from sailing on the central lakes to skiing and ice-skating at The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel, up north. As for fall foliage, it's the region's fieriest. It's positively soul-stirring to walk the section of the Maine-to-Georgia Appalachian Trail that passes through the forest and over the rocky, wind-pummeled summit of Mt.
Washington, the Northeast's highest peak. But if you're not up to the exertion, not to worry: Driving up the Mt. Washington Auto Road yields equally stunning views. With most of New Hampshire's population in the industrial south, most of the state is gloriously rustic.


Vermont


Over the past few decades, many parts of Vermont have absorbed waves of middle-class urban refugees bent on taking up residence year-round. Along with these well-dressed masses, yearning to be stress-free, has come a touch of semiprecious gentrification. Whether this is good or bad is up to the
beholder, and for millions of beholders, it is just fine. Some of the happy visitors come to ski at world-famous resorts such as Stowe, Sugarbush, Killington, Mount Snow, and the defiantly retro Mad River Glen. Other visitors drink in the charm of picture-book villages like Newfane. Still others stop along superscenic country roads like Route 100, to learn about maple syrup in local sugar shacks, or wet their lines in trout streams like the Battenkill.  Vermont tries hard to preserve itself. Billboards are banned, and laws attempt to ensure that new buildings blend harmoniously into their surroundings.


Massachusetts


Massachusetts, and arguably America, began on Cape Cod: The Pilgrims landed at what is now Provincetown before moving on to nearby Plymouth a few decades shy of 400 years ago. So it's fitting that Cape Cod is now one of America's favorite travel destinations. Sun, sand, and sparkling  sea are the lures, of course, not any deep homing instinct that leads us back to ancestral ground. But it's an interesting notion, isn't it? To think that thousands of us keep returning, year after year, to the place where the first seeds of the United States were sown. There may be no other pocket of New England, not even coastal Maine, that relies more heavily on visitors than does Cape Cod.  Full of salty, windswept beauty, the Cape -- and the neighboring islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard -- are irresistible, and those who love them return every year to trek out to lovingly maintained lighthouses and to body-surf, rock-hunt, look for eagles, and walk, endlessly, at beaches like Provincetown's Herring Cove Beach -- some of the most glorious expanses of sand on earth.


Rhode Island


For the smallest state in the Union, Rhode Island is long on diversions. About a fifth of the National Historic Landmarks in the United States sit within Rhode Island's compact borders -- some near the handsome Riverwalk in Providence, the state capital and the home of Brown University. If you visit the 1786 mansion of John Brown, one of the school's founding fathers, contemplate the source of the family wealth: the China trade and the slave trade. Many other landmarks are in Newport,
including a number of marble-and-gilt "cottages" like The Breakers. Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who created the mansion, spent his Augusts clinking champagne flutes with his buddies in their own ballrooms, rallying on the grass tennis courts of the Newport Casino, and letting sea breezes put pretense behind him on the waters of Narragansett Bay, much like the Wall Street titans who summer in Rhode Island today.


Connecticut


New England's most distinctive border with the rest of America is in Connecticut. While you don't notice much change as you move from Massachusetts or Vermont into upstate New York, the regional feeling is very striking when you come into the area from New York's Westchester County, immediately north of the Bronx. The stone walls of nearby towns take on a special poignancy here, as if they are barriers to the encroachment of the glitz and bustle from points south. With the state's many highways, it's all too easy to shoot past such bits of New England charm. Those who pause are rewarded along the coast by reminders of the area's seafaring past, such as the Maritime Aquarium in Mystic Seaport.  Inland and northward on up to the border with Massachusetts, picturesque small towns can hold their own with any on the New England scene. Home to many a bedroom community of commuters who earn their
big bucks in Manhattan, much of Connecticut is wealthy as well.