Scenic Autumn Drives in New England

New England in autumn is the most famous foliage display in America, and the problem is that everyone knows it, so the classic roads fill up and the traffic threatens to swallow the very scenery people came to see. The way to win is timing and the back roads, because the region is dense with beautiful drives, and the quieter ones are often the best.The timing is the first skill, because the color peaks at different times in different places, sweeping from the north and the high elevations in late September down to the southern valleys and the coast in late October. A live foliage map, checked before you commit a weekend, is worth more than any fixed date, and the weekdays are dramatically quieter than the weekends, when the leaf-peepers descend in force.The drives themselves are everywhere, but a few stand out, the Kancamagus Highway through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Route 100 corridor through the spine of Vermont, and the winding roads of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. The smaller roads are the secret, the numbered back roads that climb over a notch or follow a river through a valley, where the