Stay at the Old Tavern in Grafton, Vermont for $222 for Two Nights, Including Breakfast
If you want to stay in a quintessential Vermont town, close to cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and downhill skiing, you might want to take advantage of the Old Tavern in Grafton’s latest deal. Pay just $222 for two nights at the inn (through March), including a full country breakfast and an afternoon cider and Grafton Cheese social. Down the road, The Grafton Ponds Outdoor Center features 15 km of groomed Nordic skiing, wine and cheese snowshoe tours, tubing down a 600-foot high hill, and, new this year, horse-drawn sleigh rides. Never been to Grafton? Amble along Main Street past the Country Store, where I once spotted a sign posted outside asking if anyone’s seen a missing horse, and you swear you just stepped into a Currier and Ives painting. To the right is the red brick town hall, circa 1816, now home to the post office. Further up the road, past the white clapboard houses spewing smoke from their chimneys is the requisite white steeple. Across the street is the Old Tavern, opened in 1801, and once the stagecoach stop on the ride from Boston to Montreal. Ulysses S. Grant spent a night here while campaigning for his presidency and Rudyard Kipling liked the locale so much he honeymooned at the hotel in 1892. For more information on Grafton, see the story I wrote for Preservation Magazine.

Driving east of Flagstaff, the dry arid Arizona terrain gives way to colorful bands of rock, as if some Impressionist painter laid down his brushstroke on the badlands. Welcome to the glorious Painted Desert. Continue a wee bit south and prehistoric rock gives way to 200 million year old petrified wood, also colored in rainbow hues, the home of
Still don’t have plans for New Year’s Eve? Consider a 2 or 3-night getaway with
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There’s a reason they call New Hampshire the Granite State. But surprisingly most of the rock you find on the trails is quartz, gneiss, and schist, not granite. Nevertheless, if you’re hiking at the higher elevations of the Whites, you’re going to encounter rocks in every shape and size and every form of obstacle. Trails like the Crawford Path, the oldest hiking trail in use in the country, circa 1819, start off as dirt, but quickly change to rock. Once you rise above treeline after summiting Mount Pierce on the famous ridge walk, you’re entering an alpine wilderness of wildflowers, gnarly krumholz, and a mind-boggling panorama of mountains and ridges in every direction. Everywhere you look is a carpet of green, rising and falling along the slopes.
Nice Post!!
Have a look at Skiing in Gulmarg. You will surely enjoy.
Never thought of skiing in Kashmir, but looks like fun!