Vermont

Drive across Vermont in two hours, but settle into one of its valleys and you’ll find yourself still discovering things a week later: a backroad cheese farm doing clothbound cheddar, a one-room library with a wood stove, a river swimming hole the locals have managed to keep largely quiet. It is a small state with unusual depth.

Vermont’s inn culture is among America’s most established. The state has been receiving travelers since the 18th century, and the traditions hold: fireplaces in rooms, locally sourced breakfasts, innkeepers who genuinely know the territory. The farm-stay movement has added a distinct layer — working farms with maple sugaring operations, cheese caves, and farm dinners where the distance from field to plate is measured in yards. Several farms in the Northeast Kingdom and Mad River Valley now offer accommodation that blurs the line between lodging and lived experience.

Stowe is the most iconic mountain village in Vermont, with Mount Mansfield at its back, a ski resort operating since 1937, and a summer hiking culture of equal caliber to the skiing. The von Trapp Family Lodge above town — yes, those von Trapps — runs a cross-country ski center on 2,500 acres that is, among other things, a genuinely odd piece of living American history.

Waitsfield and Warren in the Mad River Valley are quieter and more agricultural than Stowe. Mad River Glen is the cult ski destination of New England: steep, rocky, famously uncrowded, cooperatively owned, and still banning snowboards — a policy held since the 1990s with evident conviction. It skis like no other resort in the East.

Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, the three counties in the state’s upper-right corner, resembles Quebec more than southern New England. Dairy farms, boreal forest, and clear lakes with no visible development on the opposite shore. It’s where you go when you want Vermont without the foliage-season foot traffic, and it delivers one of the most beautiful landscapes in the region in any season.