Vermont

To visit Vermont is to step back to a time when life operated on a smaller, slower scale. There are no billboards, no traffic, nothing even resembling a skyscraper (unless you count the occasional windmill). Instead, the 13.4 million visitors that come to Vermont each year discover and fall in love with its rolling green hills speckled with bright red barns, its sizable mountains striated with ski runs, its glittering lakes, and its dusty general stores. The farther north you venture in Vermont, the further removed from city life you feel. While southerly Manchester is filled with shopping boutiques and New York license plates, the so-called Northeast Kingdom (near Canada) offers pastoral beauty with a Québécois accent. If it's culture you seek, Burlington has become a hip outpost not just for outdoorsy types but also for arts lovers, and the pleasure of watching the sun set over the Adirondacks from a café in the Queen City is as timeless as Vermont itself.

With its biggest city of Burlington at 44 degrees north latitude, the state experiences four distinct seasons. Fall in Vermont is, of course, stunning, with particularly fiery foliage displays that start in mid-September and run through mid-October. Winter often brings brilliantly blue skies and bracing cold, a treat for those who cross-country ski in Craftsbury Outdoor Center or hit Stowe, Jay Peak, or Stratton for downhill skiing and snowboarding. (A tip to single plankers: Mad River Glen is open only to skiers.) Snow often lingers well into spring, while summer is becoming an increasingly popular time to try paddling or sailing on Lake Champlain.