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Shamrock Tour®: Farmington, Maine
There is no better time or place to tour in northern New England than when those fleeting days of Indian summer coincide with the crowning glories of fall foliage.
There's beauty to fog, especially during the transition from night to day. As the sun breaks through, pearlescent tendrils, rising from the dark waters of ponds and lakes, dance and whirl. As I ride along the riverbank, my world is intimate, a circle of limited visibility without the distraction of rolling vistas or distant mountains. It's an intimacy in which individual trees, silhouetted against the shining gray boundary of visibility, take on special meaning. The world unfolds, constantly revealing itself as ethereal veils drop, one after another.
Despite my electric vest and heated hand�grips I'm cold. The season's first hard frost lies upon the fields and the morning sun has yet to break its icy grip upon the landscape. I've left the fog at the Vermont border and Mount Washington, dressed in its fall colors, rises ahead of me like a Luminist painting.
Indian summer, that glorious time of year after the first hard frost when the sun shines brightly and the temperature briefly climbs back into the high seventies as a last encore to the summer season, usually lasts only a few days. So, taking advantage of a forecast calling for several days of ideal touring weather, I'm heading east on Route 2 to Farmington, Maine....
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