it’s FROST not SNOW! But this is what we awoke to this morning. I think I’m finally capturing that color! It’s impossible to miss even with my little camera.

(click on the one below for a larger view)

A little cloudy but I’d say we are peaking this weekend up where I live

Click on the picture to get a larger view

Someone emailed me to ask where they will find the best leaves driving from Boston to Vermont next week. LOL. I guess my nice photos of the leaves in front of my house are seen by more than just you geeks! Anyway here is a link to a page from the local daily paper (Burlington Free Press) that tries to help keep up with where the colors are.

This will be helpful to me also as I promised Rocky Lhotka a nice leaf peeping drive when he comes to Burlington to speak at Vermont.NET next week.

Yesterday Rich and I hiked south on the Long Trail from the Appalachian Gap. From near the Theron Shelter there is a great ledge where we ate lunch looking east at the Green Mountains and beyond to the White Mountains.

Here is a photo (well, 3). Click on it for an larger wide view. My camera does not do justice to the real thing.

My friend and neighbor, Sarah Jane Williamson, is going to rent her fabulous property out for the year 2005.

The house is furnished and it is one groovy place. Sarah Jane has a very unique style. The house was completely renovated in 1986 and the barn from 1995-1997. Sarah Jane is an organic farmer and the perennial beds around the house are incredible. We spend a lot of time on Friday evenings there, in the summer and fall on her porch and in the winter, cozied up to the fire place. The house is on a paved country road and about 35 min. to Burlington. Huntington is a very cool community with a lot of entrepreneurs and artists living here as well as many old-time Vermonters which makes for an interesting mix. There are two small country stores and gasoline about 1 mile away and some cool small towns about 15 minutes in different directions. And she has DSL! It is really heavenly here. If you like winter stuff, you’ve got 30 acres of great cross country skiing and you are 10 miles from Mad River Glen for skiing in the winter and right near Camel’s Hump for hiking year round. And of course, to top it off, you can attend meetings at Vermont.NET and VTSQL if you happen to be a geek. Burlington is one of the very cool small cities in the country with lots of great food, music and art. And well, Vermont is…just Vermont. Heaven.  We are also about 4 hours from Boston, 2 hours from Montreal and a quick cheap trip on Jet Blue to NYC. A little further to Seattle :-). Burlington has an int’l airport served by five major airlines as well as JetBlue and Independent which makes quick hops to D.C. This is what we call “having your cake and eating it, too!”

Here are pictures from Sept 23rd

I took these just now 10am Sept 26th as the clouds were on their way out.

well, it started a little early! If you check my last year’s pics, we are now about 10 days earlier with the amount of color than last year.

Here are some pics I just took standing in front of my house. As I sit here, I can see the same stuff out of my glass doors in my office. These photos do not capture what I am seeing truly in terms of the colors so you might have to look elsewhere for some professional pics. It’s just a wee Kodak DX3600 digital.

Dave Burke is putting Vermont fall pictures on his weblog too. You’ll see from his photos why I love to kayak so much on our beautiful lake (the 6th largest lake in the country)!

a little local flavor –

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TRAVEL/DESTINATIONS/09/21/diving.champlain.ap/index.html

There are a lot of wonderful swimming holes in Vermont thanks to the Green Mountain range and lots of creeks and streams running down from them. Some of these swimming holes, are just gentle tubs along a stream. Others are in gorges. There is a popular spot called Huntington Gorge where many people have died over the years. They get caught in water that, due to the topography of the gorge, can be like a turbine. There is another extremely popular spot called the Bolton potholes which is not so notorious. I lived up the road from them when I first moved to Vermont. On Saturday, a young man who would have turned 20 on Sunday, drowned in the Bolton Potholes. He jumped in to a spot and due to the heavy rains which creates strong currents coming down the moutains, got held under the water. It took 60 rescue workers and 2 days to retrieve his body. I don’t know this kid or his family. I just read about it in the local paper. But it is just too heartbreaking, even with all of the horrors going on in the wider world around us. It’s much more personal.

We lucked out this weekend with no rain until Sunday night. Good thing for the 65,000 people who showed up for the final Phish concert. (That’s more than 10% of the state’s entire population!) It was held in the region of Vermont called “the Northeast Kingdom”.  Here’s a story from the local paper.