Your Web Guide to the New England Fall Foliage Season

Welcome to the New England Fall Foliage Section of NewEnglandTimes.Com!

Navigation
You'll notice that the menu at left lists all of the things to be seen and done by state. We have a broad section through which to navigate, but there's a lot going on in the fall, so we wanted to make sure you had all the information you need to come on up and have the time of your life.

Trip Planning Page
After you've got all the information you need, this detailed section takes you step-by-step through the planning process of a New England fall foliage trip. It will give you all of the information you need to make a decision and put together a great trip plan. It has all of the nuts and bolts to help you prepare for your New England vacation. Here, too, are tips and ideas we've accumulated over the years. We're sharing them with you to make sure you have a great trip, but also to suggest that you know what to look out for. They'll help make your stay better and your wallet a bit heavier than anticipated. Above all, come on up to escape the chaos and enjoy the peacefulness, color, fragrances, foods, as well as the places to go and things to see and do.

The States
Once you know when you can enjoy a New England getaway, especially a New England fall foliage getaway, you'll need to consider where the peak is likeliest to be. That will help you decide which states to visit, as well as which cities and towns would be ideal for leaf-peeking, attractions, tours and a range of other things to see and do up here. We list each state and provide which activities are available, as well as tours for each state. And finding and booking a hotel room is only a couple of clicks away.

Attractions in Each State
Once you've decided where you'd like to go, we offer the Attractions Section for each state, which is loaded with a wide range of different activities. These include everything from picking your own apples to corn mazes to whale watching to taking the Alpine Slide at one of the ski resorts.

This sectionfor each state is particularly helpful if the trees are shedding leaves early. We want to give you something else to do in addition to taking in the colors or if the peak is past. The idea is to help you navigate around disappointment at all costs.

Whether you go alone or with others, you'll find yourself amply awed by the colors, the sites and different places to visit, agritouring, corn mazes and a wide range of other fascinating places to see and things to do.

The photo above is a compilation of different layers of the exact same leaf. The first was brought into Photoshop and the layer duplicated many times over. Each layer was made a different color and rotated to make it appear as if there are many different leaves. But they are all the same one, The NewEnglandTimes.Com logo.

If you’d like to participate in the autumn harvest, fall and apples have been soul mates since the birth of the myth of Johnny Appleseed wandering the whole the region casting his seeds as he went. Pick your own pumpkins or berries and try to negotiate your way through a corn maze.

Tours Section in Each State
This offers you a variety of day-trip tours that will take you not only through incredible countryside and flora, but you might just see some fauna, too. Fall is the rutting season. That it coincides with hunting season makes deer and moose a bit skittish, but you might see deer, moose or a bear, the latter of which will be gorging itself for winter hibernation.

Lodging in Each State

BOOK A ROOM IN NEW ENGLAND NOW!
Click on any of the states below to go to a list of towns. Select a town and choose an accommodation.
CONNECTICUT MAINE MASSACHUSETTS	NEW HAMPSHIRE RHODE ISLAND VERMONT
Click on any of the states above and then on a city or town and you'll get the listing of the hotels . Choose one that suit you and book the room. For your convenience at the top of each page, each stat

We also offer our rapidly growing NewEnglandTimes.Com Main Lodging Section. There you'll find more B&B inns, spas and resorts.

However you choose to enjoy this annual spectacle, you won’t be disappointed. But… keep in mind that New England foliage season is a busy time of year, so you need to start planning and making arrangements as soon as you can.

e is represented by a link. Click on it and you'll be wisked to a list of towns in that state. Once there, click on a town, and hotels, B&B inns and spas and resorts will appear. You can learn about each and book a room right then and there.

Color Change
This page explains how scientists believe the colors change, why some are yellow and others red, and why they change completely differently. It's an interesting explanation of prevailing theories.

Preserve a Leaf
This gives you instructions about how you can pick particularly elegant leaves and turn them into beautiful keepsakes, gifts, or the components of a collage of leaves that not only retain their textures, but their colors, as well.

Peak Tracker
This is a map of New England that will keep you posted on the progress of color changes. As we get into October, the colors will begin to appear and then spread somewhat rapidly.

The Photo Gallery

This is a Flash presentation in which we provide some of our favorite fall photographs taken in prior years. They are 72 dpi, so they can be purchased very inexpensively and put on display in our revamped Country Store when it celebrated its Grand Re-Opening. They can be used to make screen savers or to use on your site. Photographs taken this year will be printable in eight-by-eleven-inch size at 300 dots per inch. Those can be printed out as 8x11 or larger. All photos shipped are placed flat in a box to avoid curling. Those will be available in our Country Store in November. There are also tips here about taking photos of fall foliage.

We get lots of requests for trip ideas. Unfortunately, we can’t do itineraries, but if you have questions or would like to share your impressions of the season, please send an email to jim.hyde@newenglandtimes.com.

We really hope that this section will help you plan for fall activities that give you a trip to remember fondly whether you come up here or stay home and take your New England getaway or New England vacation by mousing through the pages of this fall foliage getaway and vacation section. Please let us know what you'd like to see in next year's Special New England Fall Foliage Section so we can improve on what we've started. Please email me with your comments at: jim.hyde@newenglandtimes.com. We'd really love to hear from you.

We wish you all the best and sincerely hope that you have a truly beyond-expectation fall foliage season this year.

The fall foliage season has begun, bringing with it an indescribable eagerness to see how Mother Nature will blend her colors this year and how rich those colors will be. Will they make for a brightly hued countryside, or will they be muted and disappointing? It could go either way in each state, even in different regions within states.

In short, trying to predict when the peak will arrive, how colorful it will be and how long it will hang around are all variables that simply can't be forecast with any great degree of accuracy. Regardless, it's an annual spectacle that has been a crowd-puller for New England for generations.

So far, in Northern Vermont and New Hampshire, the conditions exist to make this year’s colorama a blindingly bright, spectacular display worthy perhaps of being the eighth wonder of the world.

Autumn officially arrived on September 22. But there were very encouraging signs before that day that the trees have been taking stock of weather conditions and conferring about when each genus should start cutting off the chlorophyll that greens their leaves.

When they do, stark yellows, oranges, reds, magentas and gold, just might bring extra color to Mother Nature’s paintbrush this year.

The evergreens too have a role to play. They comprise a different kind of botanical phenomenon. They add to fall's splendor as green patches punctuating the deciduous-tree countryside around them.

Most people believe that evergreens are pine and fir trees only. Yet they include such genuses as Rhododendrons, Laurel, Mountain Laurel and other like flora, as well. Some genuses actually do shed leaves and pine needles every few months or every few years as new leaves and needles grow constantly.

Discerning the Essence

For my wife Terry and I, fall has been our season of choice for 31 years, whether the colors have been brilliant and mesmerizing or muted and dull. But this devout affinity has been contagious for centuries.

We’ve tried without luck to capture and understand the essence of exactly what makes us so enamored of this short season. That we first met in the fall has something to do with it, but we both loved it before then.

Beside the colors, perhaps it’s the autumnal perfume comprising the fragrances of birch, maple and oak smoke rising from chimneys mixing with the heady scent of the last cutting, and fresh, chilly air.

Or maybe it’s the anticipation of soon folding ourselves into comfortable chairs, steaming coffee in one hand, a good book in the other as snow, deep and sparkling, piles up outside. Certainly the coziness of a down comforter on a cold, autumn night is a romantic factor.

Here in upstate Vermont, we had our first significant frost on September 19th, where in some of the valleys, thermometers dove from a high platform of 60 to the chilly 20-degree mark in a matter of hours. That's a good sign as you'll discover on our Why and How Leaves Change Color page. While she can be arbitrary and capricious, Mother Nature so far is providing ideal conditions for a lavish display of her handiwork this year.

Obviously, New England comprises a massive amount of territory, and, for those of us who have chosen to cover the region, confronting us is the prickly task of trying to divine exactly when the foliage peak will arrive and how long it will stay. The unknown makes it hard to help you plan your ideal fall foliage getaway. That's especially so with Mother Nature's whimsical and mischievous sense of humor. She cares not that, to the region, fall brings the most people.

We've done our best to give you as much information as possible to understand interact with it and enjoy it as much as Terry and I and millions of others do each year.

This special New England Fall Foliage section offers a great deal of information to help you carefully scope out a great leaf-peeking safari.

Disclaimer: While we have made every effort to give the most accurate directions to the various locations we can in each state tour by checking with Google maps, the latest state maps, books about each state and our own experience, we cannot be held responsible if street names have been changed, if construction is on-going on any route, or routes have changed. We strongly advise you to take a current map with you on any fall foliage tour or trip.