A State That Decided to Stay Small — a stop on Vermont Route 100.
Something you'll notice within twenty miles of driving here, and it's worth explaining: there are no billboards. Not one, anywhere in Vermont. There hasn't been since nineteen sixty-eight, when the state banned them outright — one of only a handful of states to do it.
It goes further than that. In nineteen seventy Vermont passed a land-use law, usually just called Act Two Fifty, requiring large developments to prove they won't wreck the landscape, the water, or the character of the town. That is why you will not pass a single strip mall on this drive, why the villages still have centers, and why the hillsides aren't covered in houses.
It's controversial here. It has made housing expensive and it frustrates people who want to build. Vermonters argue about it constantly, and always have.
But the effect out your window is undeniable: a landscape that looks like the postcard because somebody legislated it into staying that way. You're not looking at an accident of remoteness. You're looking at a series of deliberate, unpopular, expensive decisions made over fifty years.
Also — no chain restaurants on this stretch to speak of. If you want lunch, it's a general store or an inn, and both will be better.