Day Trips from Burlington

Stowe Village could fairly be called the peak of Vermont. White steeples, postcard-perfect. Mount Mansfield towers above at 4,393 feet, Vermont's highest. Ride the gondola or take the seasonal auto toll road. Summer delivers excellent hiking plus the Stowe Recreation Path. Winter transforms it into one of the best ski resorts in the eastern US.

Montreal, less than two hours from Burlington, delivers a full-blown international city as a day trip. Cobblestone streets in Old Montreal and espresso bars across the Plateau feel continents away from Vermont. Crossing into a French-speaking metropolis makes the excursion feel far more substantial than the 120-mile gap suggests. The Amtrak Vermonter glides the route without traffic stress, though the drive through the Champlain Valley holds its own quiet drama.

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park could fairly be called the birthplace of American conservation, told through a well preserved estate. Woodstock wears the crown as Vermont's prettiest town, and the village green proves it with Federal-style buildings so sharp they look pressed. Quechee Gorge sits 8 miles east, dropping 165 feet in what locals call Vermont's Little Grand Canyon. Walk the bridge, you'll see the whole gorge in 30 seconds flat.

Skip the highway. The Lake Champlain ferry from Burlington to Port Kent, NY slices straight across the lake and drops you 15 miles from Lake Placid, an optional but satisfying way to start. Lake Placid hosted two Winter Olympics (1932 and 1980) and the gear is still there: the bobsled run, the ski-jump towers, an Olympic Museum that's surprisingly compelling. In summer, Mirror Lake pulls kayakers in while the High Peaks trails hand out the Adirondacks' best ridge hiking.

St. Johnsbury still runs on maple and muscle. The Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium punches above its weight, excellent for a town of 7,000. Next door, the 1871 St. Johnsbury Athenaeum hangs a massive Albert Bierstadt landscape under tin ceilings. One canvas swallows the room. Drive twenty minutes to Craftsbury Common: white fences, clapboard churches, zero souvenir shops. This is the Vermont that guidebooks forgot, working farms, glacial ponds, villages locked in 1974.

You'll walk in expecting a tidy New 19th-century Vermont village. You won't walk out for at least five hours. Shelburne Museum looks like a polite New England estate, then you discover 150,000 objects crammed into 39 historic structures on 45 acres. They've transplanted an entire village here. A full-size 1906 Lake Champlain steamboat, the Ticonderoga, squats on dry land in the middle of it all. Budget at least five hours to do it any justice.

Killington's scale hits you only when you arrive, 155 trails across 7 peaks, Vermont's largest ski resort deep in the Green Mountains. In summer the mountain bike park opens. The Long Trail crosses nearby, giving access to some of the finest ridgeline hiking in the state. Drive south through Middlebury and Brandon. You'll pass covered bridges, farm stands, and the kind of Vermont scenery that ends up in tourism campaigns.

Saratoga Springs hums with an odd voltage, Victorian spa culture, a racetrack that roars from late July through Labor Day, and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center punching the arts scene above its weight for an upstate New York city. Congress Park lets you sip the natural mineral springs for free. Off-season the town quiets. Yet the spa architecture and National Museum of Racing still justify the drive.