Vermont

The best way to ‘meet’ Vermont is to get off the highway and onto the secondary or minor roads. These are the roads that take you through the towns and villages settled when America was young. Choose from nine designated byways to almost every part of the state.

Maple creemee, a soft-serve ice cream flavoured with genuine Vermont maple syrup. Maple producers featuring this popular summer treat include Morse Sugar Farm in Montpelier, Bragg’s Sugarhouse in East Montpelier and Green Mountain Sugarhouse in Ludlow.

• Lake Champlain has a lot of history, from the first occupation of the region by Native Americans, through to the Colonial Wars, the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to the 19th-century commercial era. The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum offers shipwreck tours
• Plymouth was the boyhood home of President Calvin Coolidge; it is also where he was inaugurated as the 30th president of the United States and where he established the Summer White House.

Attend a farmers’ market. With more than 100 of them throughout the state during the summer months, they are easy to find—and even easier to enjoy.

• Vermont Teddy Bear Company: take a tour of the company in Shelburne
• Rock of Ages Granite Quarry in Barre: take a tour of the quarry, visit the factory and try your hand at sandblasting
• The Maple Landmark Woodcraft Company in Middlebury makes the wooden Name Train toy
• Green Mountain Coffee
• Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream.

Shelburne Museum is among the finest and most diverse museums of art, design and Americana. More than 150,000 works are exhibited in a landscaped setting of 39 buildings and a 19th-century steamship that once plied the waters of Lake Champlain.

Haskell Opera House and Library in Derby Line was built on the international border of the USA and Canada; it opened in 1904. The dotted line representing the border crosses the library and the opera house.

• Any of the 100-plus covered bridges (in Northfield Falls, you can get two bridges in the same shot)
• The mountain landscapes surrounding Lake Champlain
• Lake Willoughby, a seemingly bottomless glacial lake flanked by mountain cliffs
• The One Hundred Mile view on U.S. Route 9 west of Bennington (or from any of 100 mountaintops).

Broadway musicals. Communities may be small, but the performing arts are big: theatres and opera houses are found throughout the state, offering first-class musicals and stage productions.

Seeing a cow close up; many of the farms are open to the public to visit, like the Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock.