The RFSA Travel Interest Group offered a trip to New England in the fall, entitled New England Rails and Trails. This was an 8-day, 7-night trip departing on October 10, 2020 (due to Covid, this trip was postponed to October, 2021). The trip began in Boston with an overnight stay and included a Boston City tour the first full day of the trip. After the city tour and lunch, the group traveled into New Hampshire’s scenic White Mountains and arrived in the picturesque North Conway area of New Hampshire for a two-night stay.
The second day included one of the highlights of the trip, 2 rail journeys. The first was on the Mt. Washington Cog Railway to the top of the highest peak in the Northeast on the world’s first mountain-climbing cog railway. The return trip to the North Conway area was aboard the Conway Scenic Railroad, a nostalgic ride through the scenic Mt. Washington Valley.
The following two nights were spent in Burlington, Vermont and included excursions through New England’s most popular scenic drive along the Kancamagus Highway, with spectacular views of rushing rivers and covered bridges; a drive through Quechee Gorge; Vermont’s Little Grand Canyon; and, a visit to Woodstock, Vermont where guests enjoyed a visit to a working dairy farm and museum of Vermont life in the 1890’s.
Prior to arriving in Portland, Maine, the last two nights’ stay, visits included the Shelburne Museum, located in Vermont’s scenic Lake Champlain Valley and later a visit to Cold Hollow Cider Mill, a modern-day apple cider mill. An additional treat was a visit to the famous Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream factory, founded in 1978 in a renovated gas station. Yes, a scoop of the famous dessert awaited at the end of the tour.
Prior to arriving in Portland, there was a visit to a maple sugar farm and then enjoying spectacular New England scenery enroute to the Maine coast for the last two nights. While in Portland there was leisure time to visit Old Port, the historic waterfront of Portland, in addition to views of lovely Victorian cottages while on a cruise along the Casco Bay and Little & Great Diamond Island. A visit to the Portland Head Lighthouse and Museum, one of America’s oldest and most photographed lighthouses concluded the New England sites.
The farewell dinner was, of course, a lobster dinner to celebrate the scenic and memorial past eight days in New England.
