Flatter Vermont towns like Middlebury and Rutland are rimmed with mountain views, sort of like Denver. You can see alpine shapes along the horizon, but you know you have a drive ahead of you before you can climb into them.
Montpelier is already there. Tourists trudge up the stone tower in Hubbard Park, which rises behind the State House. From here you can see for miles: pastures, clumps of trees, the occasional clapboard house, and the slightly hazy silhouette of the horn-shaped mountain called Camel's Hump.
Even the dots that connect up into Montpelier itself are neatly arranged. Here's the easily walkable 19th-century downtown, and over here, a couple of toy-sized colleges: the New England Culinary Institute and Vermont College.
For me, this area is about small lawns, geraniums in pots (my grandparents were the town's florists -- we knew of no other), and maybe best of all, the chance to poke around in a village that is a rare central-Vermont blend.
Going about their errands all around you are the locals -- not the pink-and-green-clad people from the resorts, but old-time hunters with T-shirts and caps, and their polar opposites, never-say-die North Country vegans in sandals and billowy cottons.
The town is worth a taste.
Montpelier's early history -- what you can find of it -- is vague. A man named Colonel Davis built its first house, a log cabin on the Winooski River. That was in 1787, when Vermont was still an independent republic with its own postal service and coins.
By the early 1800s, the republic had become a state, and the pocket-sized town of Montpelier, which now has 8,035 residents, somehow beat out bigger Burlington to become the capital. Vermont is now on its third State House, a compact, perfectly proportioned stone building that, because of its reflective hat (the dome's shiny leaf contains gold) looks as imposing as more important monuments in more cosmopolitan towns.
