Someone once told me that Vermont used to have more cows than people. As we cycled by unraveling fields of black and white Holsteins, their heads turning after us in mild, cud-chewing interest, I found this easy to believe. It was early Monday morning, late September, and the sun was gliding the Green Mountain peaks to the west. Mist still lay in the valleys. Normally September saw me at the front of a classroom, but I was on sabbatical and part of a group of 19 cyclists doing ”Breakaway Two: The Sugarbush and White River Valleys.”
The road just out of Warren, Vt., was now mercifully flat. I reached down and pulled the front derailleur level, and the bike chain clinked onto the rarely-used large sprocket. The resistance increased but so did my speed. Ahead, three cyclists bent around a curve, their black Spandex shorts vanishing beyond some flaming sugar maples.
(Though the state has eight kinds of maple, it is acer saccharum, the sugar maple whose incandescence symbolizes autumn in Vermont. Turning brilliant hues of scarlet, orange and yellow, it towers 130 feet and dwarfs lesser hardwoods like beech, yellow birch, oak and hickory.)
As I followed the curve, a few leaves-vermilion as big as dinner plates-whirled by. Fall comes early in New England.
As much as cows, tourists are the lifeblood of Vermont, and in the red-gold days of autumn they outnumber even the skiers who follow. Known to the locals as ”leafers,” they fill the inns and roads to view one of the most spectacular season changes around.
Most tour by car, taking their nature through glass, but many have found a better way-by bicycle-to see New England in the fall. You don`t just see it, you absorb it, hear it, smell it, even feel it.
Of course, the prospect of pumping up a steep grade, head pointed downward, 60 pounds of luggage in your panniers, may seem daunting, but this prospect and your load are lightened considerably by traveling with one of Vermont`s half-dozen bicycle touring companies.
The one we were using that sunny September morning was Vermont Country Cyclers. Its organization and rates are typical. Operating from May to October, it offers three kinds of tours: Country Weekends, Explorers and Breakaways. (More on these later.)
The group`s size varies with the company, 20 being about average. Once on the road, the group tends to fragment anyway, depending on cycling difficulty and number of miles in the point-to-point route options.
The van or ”sagwagon,” carrying spare parts and extra bikes, shuttles back and forth along the routes like a mother hen, checking its brood for bike troubles or spent energies.
Shortly after noon at a prearranged spot the van sets up a sumptuous smorgasbord lunch. For this you pay an extra $4 a day and it`s a bargain. By late afternoon the van has gone on to the next inn on the circuit and your luggage is there when you arrive.
Our five-day tour, Breakaway Two (the number signifies the particular area of Vermont), had begun that morning just outside Waitsfield (due west of Barre) at Tucker Hill Lodge, a gray and blue clapboard inn with a bar, pool and a cosmopolitan bill of fare. We were given a choice of five entrees here instead of the usual one offered in most other inns we visited on the trip.
By 6 p.m. Sunday all members of the group had checked in from far-flung places such as San Diego, Carson City and London, Ontario, the last from which I and my cycling partner, Jim French-also on sabbatical-had driven.
More than half the group, even some who had flown in, had brought their own bikes, and over swordfish steaks and chocolate mousse, there was much talk of gear ratios, sprockets and carbo loading. Jim and I began to wonder what we were about to tackle.
We`d left our old boneshaker bikes at home. For $79 VCC rents you a well- tuned and equipped 12-speed Nishiki with a mirror, a rear ”mousetrap”
carrier (useful when if rains) and a handlebar bag with a plastic window for your map or route directions.
Before dinner those without bikes had been outfitted and afterwards in the beamed lounge of Tucker Hill the tour leaders (one male, one female, and both in their `20s, energetic and fit) gave out route directions, collected monies due and had cyclists introduce themselves. When one of the cyclists introduced herself as the president of a Chicago cycling club, Jim and I thought we should have taken a car-not a bike-tour. However, a few others in the group turned out to be equally as inexperienced and intimidated as we were, and this made us feel better.
At breakfast the next morning at 8 we got down to the carbo-loading:
blueberry pancakes and maple syrup. While we were sipping our second cup of coffee, a leader went over the day`s route and we made notations on our route direction sheets. These sheets were invaluable: They not only told us where to turn our bikes on the route, but how to find things we`d never have discovered on our own.
Sometimes the directions were brutally honest: ”Killer hill ahead.”
About 9 a.m., helmeted, water bottles full and tires hard, we rattled down the gravel drive of Tucker Hill Lodge, hung a right at the pavement, coasted by the Moose Lips Tavern, past some ubiquitous Holsteins, and on down into Waitsfield, where we crossed our first covered bridge.
Beyond Waitsfield the country suddenly slanted upwards.
While in Vermont many cyclists pick up a particular T-shirt featuring a man hunched over his handlebars and ascending a near vertical grade, under which are the words, ”Vermont Ain`t Flat.” This drawing is a fairly accurate portrait of Bethel Hill, which we hit just before lunch. Even with a ”granny gear” (a bicycle`s equivalent of an old car`s ”bull low”-not all bikes have it), this incline is enough to daunt a decathlon champ. It`s seared into my memory as the hill of the whole trip, after which all other ascents appeared as mounds.
Nothing says you can`t walk a hill, but leaders urge you to bike it, even if you have to stop now and then. It`s actually easier to ride, they say. So up and up we pushed, with lungs feeling as though they were ready to burst, legs turning to rubber, eyes seeing only gray pavement ahead.
Just where the road canted impossibly upwards yet again, there was, placed with grim irony, a cemetery. Here we slumped on the grass while the ghosts of old cyclists clashed their ectoplasmic gears and laughed mockingly. However, if ”Vermont Ain`t Flat,” half of it is downhill, and when, bathed in sweat, we finally ground to the crest (the air even seemed thinner) we had a three-mile rapid run down to a gourmand`s lunch by the shores of Silver Lake. Slabs of roast beef and chicken between thick slices of crusty bread slathered with mayonnaise and crammed with lettuce never tasted so good. Neither did several quarts of Gatorade, lemonade and cranapple juice followed by pint of that Vermont delicacy, Ben and Jerry`s ice cream.
The afternoon was more sedate under a butterscotch sun. Fatigue increased; so did our stops: Moss Glen Falls, the Je-Nel wooden products in Granville, and antique shops everywhere.
The van driver was quite willing to cart any purchase on to the next inn, even an old merry-go-round horse that one ecstatic cyclist found moldering in a barn full of memorabilia. General stores, too, became magnets. And we couldn`t pass up a T-shirt with a cow on it or another bottle of Snapple
(Vermont soda drink), which we carried across to a shady village green and drank wearily on the September grass.
At the end of the afternoon`s ride to the rambling dark green Tupper Farm Lodge (near Rochester, Vt.) we found iced punch waiting in a huge cut glass bowl. Then we plunged into a nearby river, while just upstream a local man in waders, seemingly unconcerned, flicked his fly rod and, while we swam, stuffed a couple of fat trout into his creel.
The next day it was on to the October Country Inn (10 miles from Woodstock and then, following that stop, a swing north to a layover day at the Green Trails Inn at Brookfield, a tranquil site with one of America`s few floating bridges.
By midweek a strong group spirit had developed, a camaraderie born of shared experience-eating together, singing around a piano, playing Trivial Pursuit, or just bending an elbow and talking in the lounge. By 10 each night most people were ready to flop, but not at the Green Trails after the innkeeper warned us that a genuine ghost stalked the upper halls. The idea inspired some guests to ”create” their own ghosts.
All day Thursday we biked through a cold drizzle (having chosen to ride, even on layover day). After dinner beside a crackling fire, we made the traditional joke presentations-a Crash and Burn Award for someone who had fallen, the Pathfinder Award to the person most often lost, and so on. Underlying the good humor was a regret the trip was almost over.
Friday afternoon the group pedaled back to its starting point at Waitsfield, passing through Montpelier, where we ate lunch on the dappled lawn of the state capitol, the sky cerulean through yellow leaves, the sun on the gold dome.
At Tucker Hill Lodge, we exchanged ”Be sure to look us up” invitations, showered, packed up and headed home. According to the radio, there was the chance of snow in the mountains. As Jim and I silently drove northwards towards wives, kids and mortgage payments, I thought of what Thoreau had written more than 100 years ago: ”The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements.” He hung out not far from Vermont. Maybe he`d done some cycling, too.
WHERE TO BOOK A VERMONT CYCLING TRIP
Operating through three seasons, Vermont bicycle touring companies are quite competitive, and though each offers a similar arrangement-bookings at country inns and a van that accompanies you with your luggage-the details of their trips differ.
My cycling partner and I booked a trip through Vermont Country Cyclers, which offers three kinds of tours: Country Weekends, Explorers and Breakaways. A Country Weekend (average price $189) begins with a Friday dinner followed by two different rides on Saturday and Sunday, both of which return to the same inn. The terrain varies with the inn`s location but these trips are possible even for the tyro. The weekend concludes about 4 p.m. Sunday.
Explorers and Breakaways (average price $489) are both five-day tours, running Sunday evening to Friday afternoon. The difference between them is the distance, and, to some extent, the terrain. Explorers take in ”easy to moderate” ground and cover 15 to 30 miles a day.
Breakaways (”for the very energetic beginner, intermediate and advanced cyclists”) cover ”moderate to sometimes difficult” terrain (i.e., they have some stiff hills) and span 40 to 60 miles daily. Both Explorers and Breakaways have optional longer routes.
For more information, write Vermont Country Cyclers, Box 145, Waterbury Center, Vt. 05677, or call 802-244-5215.
Besides Vermont Country Cyclers, two other good companies include:
Vermont Bicycle Touring, Box 711-EL, Bristol, Vt. 05443, or call 802-453-4811.
Bike Vermont, Box 75, Grafton, Vt. 05146, or call 802-843-2259.
