The Road Itself — a stop on the Kancamagus Highway.
Let me tell you about the road under your wheels, because it's younger than you probably think, and for most of its life it wasn't a road at all — it was two dead ends.
For decades there was a rough track running east from Lincoln that petered out in the woods, and another running west from Conway that did the same, and between them lay miles of mountain with nothing through it. If you wanted to get from one side to the other you drove a long way around. The two ends were finally joined in nineteen fifty-nine — so this through-road is younger than color television. It wasn't fully paved until nineteen sixty-four, and they didn't even try to plow it in winter until the late sixties.
In nineteen ninety-six it was designated a National Scenic Byway, which is a formal way of saying what you can see out the window: that this is one of the great drives in America. Something like three-quarters of a million vehicles come through in a year, and a startling share of them in about three weeks of autumn.
Which brings me to some honest practical advice. On a peak foliage weekend in early October, this road becomes a parking lot — every pull-off full, traffic nose to tail. If that's when you're here, come at first light; the difference between seven in the morning and eleven is the difference between a wilderness and a queue. And in winter this is a serious mountain road: it's plowed, but it's high, exposed, and there's no service and no signal. Carry a blanket and don't count on your phone.
The road's a young thing, all told. The mountains it crosses are not.