Whitefield, NH
The highest peak in the northeastern United States at 6,288 feet — and home to what the observatory itself markets as "the world's worst weather." Hurricane-force winds (74+ mph) occur more than 100 days per year. On April 12, 1934, observatory staff recorded a 231-mph wind gust at the summit — the world record for surface wind speed for 62 years, until Tropical Cyclone Olivia hit Barrow Island, Australia in 1996. The 1934 record is still the U.S. surface wind record. The mountain's weather is so extreme because it sits at the convergence of three major storm tracks, has prevailing westerly winds traveling unobstructed for hundreds of miles, and creates an upslope-acceleration "venturi effect" through its peaked summit. The Mount Washington Cog Railway, opened July 3, 1869, was the first mountain-climbing cog railway in the world — still operating today with a mix of steam and biodiesel engines, climbing 3.1 miles at grades up to 37 percent. The summit hosts a year-round nonprofit weather observatory founded in 1932, whose climate dataset informs National Weather Service forecasting models for the entire Northeast.
A small Ivy League college on the Vermont border in Hanover, New Hampshire — founded 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock under a royal charter from King George III, originally intended to educate Native American boys (very few attended; the school quickly pivoted to colonial English students). The ninth-oldest U.S. institution of higher education, the smallest in the Ivy League (about 4,500 undergraduates). The Dartmouth Green — a 7-acre quadrangle bordered by the historic Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth Hall (1791 original, reconstructed 1906 and again 1935), and the Hopkins Center for the Arts — is the geographic and ceremonial center of the campus and town simultaneously. Daniel Webster (Class of 1801) defended the college's independence before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), establishing the contract-clause protection for private corporations against state interference — one of the most important cases in U.S. constitutional history. Other Dartmouth alumni: poet Robert Frost (briefly, 1892, before transferring), surgeon C. Everett Koop, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and journalist Mindy Kaling. The Hood Museum of Art holds one of the oldest college-museum collections in the U.S.
Off Route 100 in Waterbury, Vermont — the original headquarters factory of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Holdings, founded in 1978 by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in a renovated Burlington gas station with a $5 ice-cream-making correspondence course from Penn State. The Waterbury plant opened 1985 as their main production facility and remains operational today. The half-hour factory tour shows the actual production line through observation windows (which flavor depends on the day's schedule), tells the company's history (the 2000 sale to Unilever for $326 million, the founders' subsequent activism, the strict 5-to-1 highest-to-lowest pay ratio they negotiated as a sale condition), and ends with a sample of the current flavor in the moo-decorated tasting room. The Flavor Graveyard outside the factory has actual stone headstones for every retired flavor (over 350 buried) — Wavy Gravy, Sugar Plum, Vermonty Python, and others — with epitaphs. Vermont's 100-mile Route 100 corridor through the Green Mountains is the state's primary scenic byway; Stowe Mountain Resort is 14 miles north, the Trapp Family Lodge (Sound of Music) is in Stowe, and the Cabot Creamery is east in Cabot.
You're at Burlington (KBTV); the Shelburne Museum is just south, and from the air it doesn't read like a museum. It reads like forty-five acres with a 220-foot steamboat sitting in the middle of a field, nowhere near water. That's the Ticonderoga, the last vertical-beam sidewheel steamer in the country. Headed for scrap in 1954, she was bought by Electra Havemeyer Webb, who had all 892 tons dragged two miles overland on custom rail, across fields and US Route 7, over two winters, to sit on dry land where she's been since 1955. That's the whole museum in one object: Webb collected buildings as much as art. She moved thirty-nine of them onto the campus (a covered bridge, a one-room schoolhouse, a stone jail, a circular barn, an 1871 lighthouse barged across Lake Champlain and rebuilt stone by stone) and filled them with 150,000 pieces of American folk art. Her parents collected Manet and Degas; she collected the things ordinary Americans made. Both ended up here.