Stretch Your Legs in the Gulf — a stop on Vermont Route 100.
Since we are in the quietest six miles on this whole road, this is the place to actually stop — and the boardwalk at the falls is only part of it.
Pull into the turnout and just stand still for two minutes with the engine off. There is no traffic noise here, no houses, no power lines. In a small state on a busy road that is genuinely rare, and it is the single cheapest thing you can do on this drive that you will actually remember.
Look at what grows in a notch like this. The steep walls hold shade and cold air, so you get hemlock and yellow birch and a floor of moss and ferns that stays damp all summer — much more like northern Maine than like the valley farms we passed an hour ago. In the wet seeps you will find jewelweed, whose seed pods explode when you touch them, and which is the traditional remedy for the stinging nettle that grows right beside it.
Listen for water in three registers at once: the falls themselves, the brook under the road, and the seeps coming straight out of the rock wall.
In winter this whole gulf turns to ice — the falls freeze into a blue column and the road ices in the shade, and it is spectacular and genuinely dangerous in equal measure.
Two minutes. Engine off. Then we will start down the other side.