Dover and Newfane
4/27/24
This is the ride of extremes. It is both one of the simplest and one of the most challenging short rides we’ve done so far. Simple because it’s straight down a single road for 4 miles, and challenging because then it’s straight up for the last four, with 1000 feet of elevation change each way. Most of the roads in this ride were paved, but with no real heavily traffic, so it felt pretty safe.
Dover is found in southern VT, so you have to turn off the interstate south of Putney, drive up and down and along some winding roads and under a covered bridge just to get to the start. We were driving a camper, so that was fun!
The ride proper starts at a really beautiful and apparently under-utilized town forest park at the top of a hill at the end of a paved dead end road. There are extensive hiking trails and great views, but we were the only ones in the parking lot.
There are some charming village spots, like the East Dover General Store or the Dover Town Hall, seen below.
However, I thought I had seen rich Vermont before, but this area of Vermont -being this close to the Massachusetts border- is heavily prized as a second home destination for people from Boston or New York. You see perfectly pristine mini-mansions everywhere in some of the most gorgeous landscape settings you could imagine. I love Vermont, but this ride made me realize that there is much of this state that I don’t really know – the parts that attract the ultra-wealthy. I know middle-income Vermont, where a few million dollar houses are polka-dotted here and there, but this extensive wealth was quite an eye-opener for me.
This is the first time we’ve used our camper, which we have actually purchased so that we can can continue this 251 Gravel Rides Project and go to the far north and the far south of Vermont, beyond a typical day trip range.
If you are camping and biking, you might want to consider Sunrise Farm Hip Camp. Although it doesn’t have electrical plug-ins for RVs at all their sites, and did not at our site by the big pond, it was still a gorgeous experience. We would recommend Roy and his Hip Camp set up to anyone with a smaller trailer that can be mostly self-sufficient, although he does have some plug-in w/water spots at the top of the hill.
