Day 22 - 23 Sep - Quechee, Vt to Lake Placid, N.Y

If you had to order a perfect day…this would be it! There aren’t enough of these kinds of days and we were in the right place, at the right time, and had the time and opportunity to take it all in.
It was a cool night and misty when we got up but before we were on the road 15 minutes, the fog cleared and the sun came out…not a cloud in the sky. We’d already decided we were going to meander over to Lake Placid and stay there for our last night on the road so we headed west on Hwy 4 and through another beautiful blaze of colour in the Green Mtns. The first major town we came to was Woodstock. I WANT TO MOVE HERE! I mean it...I'm selling everything and moving here!!
It’s like something out of a movie, complete with the bubbling brook, but honestly one of the most wonderful towns we’ve seen. It is Vermont at it’s very best—especially on a sunny autumn day. There were big, beautiful, very old homes (one of which is a book store), window boxes on every store and house window filled with pots of mums in bloom, two or three old churches with huge maple trees blazing with red/orange/yellow leaves. Honestly…it was just plain…enchanting! It was a fair sized town with a few big B&Bs and a couple of hotels that ‘fit’ the locale.
Because we were at a higher elevation, the leaves were in full autumn foliage and Gertie (our GPS) took us through back roads, past Norman Rockwell painting of dairy farms with big, red barns and healthy cows. All of the General Stores in the small towns along the way were decorated with corn stalks, pumpkins, and pots of mums in every colour of the rainbow. The drive was a delight for the eyes!
The ski slopes at Killington and Pico were gorgeous and I wish the cable cars had been working as the sight at the top would have been awesome—but only a tad more than what we saw all day. There are still wild asters in purple and mauve mixed with yellow goldenrod all along the side of the road and sometimes in a big patch around the marshy areas..so beautiful.
At Larrabees Point we took the ferry across to NY at Fort Ticonderoga. The ferry was built in 1759 who built his big stone house (still there) with all the stones from the fort when the British abandoned it after battles with the French & Americans. Keeping track of all the battles/wars/skirmishes in US history could be a full-time job…..
We got to Lake Placid early and stopped at the edge of town to look at the lake and find out where the closest KOA was to us. I could see smoke rising just down the road and then the fire engines/ambulances and truckloads of volunteer firefighters arrived and we realized it was just next door to the hotel parking lot where we had stopped…in other words…we were blocked in. What’s the best way to wait out a fire….go shopping!! Bass, IZOD, Geoffrey Bean, and Van Heusen were literally giving stuff away. It was one of those 70% off, additional 10% senior discount, and 5% coupon days and we got a few very good buys. After a couple of hours we got to the KOA and have settled in for the night. The couple next to us (from N.Carolina) are another ‘sleep in the rear of the truck’ type campers but forgot their plug-in adaptor for their TV & heater. We’ve let them plug in to our van as it’s going to be a bit cool tonight. We’ll be heading home tomorrow. It’s been another fabulous trip but I’m ready for my own bed and shower for a bit.