Fall (with a dash of winter) Colors

We spent the middle week of October catching the tail end of the prettiness of fall. We started out in the Lakes Region in New Hampshire, poked around there and the southern White Mountains, and then headed over to Lake Dunmore in Vermont, in between Rutland and Middlebury. We did some hikes, grilled some meats, drank some beer, tasted apple cider doughnuts good and bad, and generally soaked in the crunchy crisp New England fall goodness. It was unseasonably cold the whole week, so we got a little taste of winter snow. Yay!

On our first hike, up Squam Mountain, Rachel was on a quest to bring the perfect leaf back to a season-deprived northern California child:

Spiffy display of those window glass thingies in some ye olde general store in a little New Hampshire village:

Some stuff we saw in the White Mountains:


Views from the Welch and Dickey peaks trail:


This was our view from our cozy little place in Vermont. You could almost hear the lake sighing with regret for the summer visitors, long since returned to school and work.

We were just a stone's throw from Burlington, so we spent a day with these folks (shown here in the midst of a Lake Champlain Chocolate hot chocolate fix/stupor), friends of Rachel's from college:


They showed us the highlights of Burlington, a mellow city with a Seattleish feel, along the eastern edge of Lake Champlain with the Adirondacks rising prettily over the western shore. They also let us sample their homemade honey (well, not homemade, but made by bees with whom they are acquainted), which looked like this:

and indulged John in his favorite vacation activity:


When we got back this cartoon appeared in the Nov. 9, 2009 New Yorker:

As we are not New Yorkers, I'm sure it wasn't targeted at us. Happy fall! More pics.