The Notch &
the KingdomVermont

• Cross at Highgate Springs (quiet), not Lacolle. Live wait times.
• Passports (or NEXUS / enhanced licence); PR card as well if applicable.
• Download offline Google Maps for northern Vermont before crossing — real dead zones in the NEK, the Notch, and along VT-15.
• Roaming: Rogers ~$15–18/day, Bell/Telus $14/day; a US eSIM is cheaper for four days.

Highway-service vegetarian on the 401 is a cheese bagel and a hash brown, so eat the packed lunch at break 2 instead. If the car needs a stop sooner, Mallorytown North is the better-stocked of the two. The old note pointing to the Brossard restaurants is in the Archive.

Le Tandoor and Shaan Tandoori (Brossard) were the plan's sit-down lunch. They stay as a fallback if you change your mind, but the packed lunch saves about 40 minutes and puts you at the border around 14:35.

Catalyst Coffee Bar and The Traveled Cup are the two specialty options in town. Charlie's Coffee & Company is the better bet if anyone wants actual food — all-day breakfast and lunch with vegetarian and gluten-free options flagged on the menu. Verify hours before detouring; small-town Vermont closes early midweek.

Arriving after ~5:30 PM, or fried from the drive? Skip it — it's slotted as the Sunday-morning fallback. Directions: VT-100 south, left on Randolph Rd, first right on Moss Glen Falls Rd, gravel lot on the left.

Raja, 151 Main St, Stowe (ph 802-760-6685) is open to 9:00 Thursday to Saturday and closed Sunday. Piecasso (pizza, daily) is the other reliable vegetarian option.

• Two litres of water between you — there is nothing on the Pinnacle.
• Something to eat at the top. It is a three-hour hike and lunch is not until 11:30.
• Layers and a wind shell: the knob is exposed and the valley is near freezing at dawn.
• Grippy shoes — the upper third is dew-wet rock at that hour.

• Blue-blazed; half a mile of gentle meadow, then the staircase begins.
• Note the fork about a mile up so you take the same branch down.
• Light scrambling near the top; grippy shoes for dew-wet rock.

Parking — two lots, and they are not next door. The main trailhead lot (44.43882, −72.66764) holds about nine cars. Pinnacle Meadows, the Stowe Land Trust overflow off Pinnacle Rd (44.43779, −72.64712), is 1.6 km — a full mile — east of it by road, not a short walk across a field. Falling back to it costs roughly twenty minutes of road walking each way; better to drop the walkers at the trailhead and shuttle the car back. This is the whole reason the departure is 6:45 and not 7:30.

Buffer and turnaround. The window is 3 h 30 for a hike that moves in 2.5–3 h, so there is a real half-hour of slack in it — for the summit, for photographs, for the lot being full and having to drop to Pinnacle Meadows. Spend it. The one hard rule: if you are not on the summit knob by 10:00, turn around. The gondola is the fixed point of the afternoon, not this hike, and everything after 10:45 is built on getting down on time.

• Raja, 151 Main St — opens at 11:00, so it is available the moment you come off the hill, and it is four doors from the coffee. Ten vegetarian mains. Your one restaurant meal of the trip, since dinners are at home. Lunch is 30 minutes, so order quickly.
• Green Goddess Café, 618 S Main St — 7:30 AM to 3:00 PM daily. Salads, sandwiches, smoothies, a genuinely wide vegetarian and vegan range. The faster and lighter option, and the better one if you have a gondola ticket booked.
• von Trapp Bierhall, 1333 Luce Hill Rd — opens 11:30, ten minutes up the hill. Lagers and the meadow view are the draw; the food is brats-and-schnitzel with a thin vegetarian edge. Better as a drink stop than a meal for you.
• Piecasso — pizza, in town, daily, reliably vegetarian.
• The viewpoint is not the church. Google carries a separate place, "Stowe Community Church View Point", and that is the spot the classic steeple-against-the-maples shot is taken from. Navigating to the church address puts you at the building, not at the angle. Both buttons are above — take the Viewpoint one first.
• Timing: 60 minutes: a 30-minute quick lunch, then a 30-minute coffee and the church view point. If the Pinnacle ate its buffer, drop Emily's Bridge first. Lunch and coffee stay at 30 minutes each; dinner is at home.

Friday is the heaviest day of the trip — roughly twelve and a half hours door to door and 9.7 km on foot. Of everything on it, the gondola is the one thing that is neither a hike nor a view you cannot get another way, and it costs ninety minutes and around US$85 for two. The Notch and the Pinnacle are the day. If something has to go, this goes. The card below is the cheaper, more flexible substitute for the same mountain.

If you skip the gondola, the toll road is the pick (about 90 min, the best view of the alternatives, $37 + $14 per extra passenger). For an easy afternoon with no view, take Cold Hollow Cider Mill instead: VT-100 in Waterbury Center, daily 8–6, free, cider donuts and press demos, 30 to 45 minutes. Either fits before the 3:00 Bingham Falls stop.

• Cheaper for two or more. $37 + $14 = $51 against roughly $80–86 for two gondola tickets. The gap widens with every extra person.
• No queue and no booking. The gondola wants tickets bought in advance and has real foliage-season lines; you just drive up to the toll house.
• Higher, and it goes somewhere. 3,850 ft against the Cliff House at ~3,625 ft, and the ridge to the Chin continues from it.
• Carry cash. Reports conflict — one source states all Vermont toll roads are cash-only and GoStowe does not specify. Bring both cash and card.
• No food at the top. The Cliff House restaurant is a gondola thing. Pack something, or eat in the village first as the plan already has you doing.
• Gravel, and steep. Fine for a normal car in the dry; it is not a road for a nervous driver in rain or fog. If the summit cams show cloud, both options are pointless — spend the time in the Notch instead.
• Season ends mid-October, weather permitting, so 2 October is comfortably inside it.
• The Chin hike itself, Summit Station to the Chin: 1.4 mi, 546 ft gain (Green Mountain Club figures). No single curated AllTrails page covers this exact leg — "The Chin via Sunset Ridge" and "The Nose to The Chin" are different approaches — so the button above is a hiker's recorded GPS track, not an official trail page.

Start: Lintilhac Park, behind the Community Church, which is where you have lunch and coffee just before. Other lots on the path: Chase Park, Thompson Park and Brook Rd. Because the start is next to the village, you can leave the car where you parked for lunch and walk straight on.

Timing: 30 to 90 minutes, your choice. The next fixed point is Bingham Falls at 3:00, so be back at the car by about 2:30. The 2026 path condition was not checked, and I did not find a separate closure notice in the plan's research.

From the top-of-Notch lot: 2.2 mi RT but a hard ~1,000 ft on eroded, slippery rock staircase, with an active bear situation at the pond shelter. Worth it only as a substitute for the gondola, from the Notch top at ~7 AM on a clear morning — not appended to a full day. AllTrails

The Bierhall is a view and a beer garden more than it is a vegetarian dinner — the kitchen is Austrian, which means brats, schnitzel and one or two meatless plates. So the plan is drink there at 7:00, dinner at Raja at 8:00 (151 Main St, ph 802-760-6685, open to 9:00 on Friday). Ring Raja ahead: it is a small room on a foliage Friday and reservations were not confirmable online. Book the Bierhall on Resy either way; it is one of the most contested tables in Stowe at peak foliage.

A day pass gets you onto the lodge grounds and its trail network. The short one is Chapel Hill: about half a mile, steep, to the chapel Werner von Trapp built with his family — a good leg-stretch if the Pinnacle gets rained out and you want something gentler. No dedicated AllTrails page found for this one — the lodge's own trail map is the authoritative source: vontrappresort.com/hiking. Bierhall reservations go through Resy; walk-ins are taken when there is space, but this is one of the most popular tables in Stowe at peak foliage, so book it.

• ~8:40 Cambridge Junction (Poland Covered Bridge)
• ~9:00 Gates Farm Covered Bridge
• ~9:30 Drive north to Montgomery
• 9:55 – 11:00 The Montgomery covered bridges
• ~11:15 VT-118 to Enosburg Falls and Swanton, then I-89 north

The App Gap traverse (Route B) is in the Archive.

The market opens at 10:00. Staying for it moves the border crossing to about 13:00 or later, in the Sunday leaf-season queue window the plan is built to avoid, and you reach Whitby closer to 8:30 PM. The honest trade: pick the market or pick the early crossing.

Stowe Farmers Market runs Sundays 10–2 at Topnotch Field — lovely, but it costs roughly two hours of arrival time. Your call that morning.

• Le Tandoor — 1555 Provencher Blvd #4, Brossard. Sunday 12:00–9:00 PM, so a 1:30 arrival is comfortably inside service. Ph 450-672-6112.
• Shaan Tandoori — 2550 Boul Lapinière. Weekday lunch runs 11:30–2:30 but Sunday hours were not confirmable — phone 450-678-9322 before counting on it.
• If you would rather keep driving, a packed lunch plus washroom is still about 20 minutes, so the restaurant costs you only ten more.
• Skip it entirely only if the CBSA queue at Highgate Springs ate the morning — then eat at ONroute Mallorytown and accept it.

Saturday runs Craftsbury Common at 12:30, The Genny optionally at 1:15, then Barr Hill and home via Hardwick and VT-15. Greensboro is on that road, roughly ten minutes past Craftsbury. Take it instead of the direct VT-14 run and you add about ten minutes to the drive for a second village and a lake. If The Genny is heaving — or you skipped it — Willey's coffee bar in Greensboro is the alternative.

Sunset Rock is scheduled at 5:45 back in Stowe village, and the Jeffersonville loop takes you the other way round the mountain. You can have the bridge or Sunset Rock, not both. If the Notch has been the highlight of the day, take the loop and skip the ledge; if the light is doing something, keep Sunset Rock and pick the bridge up another day.

From Craftsbury it is Hardwick → Danville → Peacham and back to base on US-2/VT-15 — roughly an hour and a quarter of extra driving on a day that already starts at 5:45 and includes a 3 h 45 hike. It fits on paper: leave Craftsbury at 2:30, Peacham by 3:30, base by 5:00, dinner at 6:30. Whether it fits in practice depends entirely on how the Pisgah buffer went. Decision rule: only if you are off the mountain by 11:20 and out of Craftsbury by 2:30. Otherwise leave it — it deserves its own morning, not the tail of a long day.

Best folded in before the hike rather than after — but that means leaving base at 5:30 in the dark to gain a village you would see in flat pre-sunrise light. The better version is on the way home: from North Beach, drop south on VT-5A instead of north on VT-58, take East Burke, and return via US-5 and Hardwick. That trades Barton, Craftsbury Common and Greensboro for the Burkes — a swap, not an addition. Craftsbury is the better village; take the Burkes only if the Sept 29 report puts the colour further south.

Friday already ends at Sunset Rock at 5:45 and dinner at 7:15, and Montgomery is 45 minutes beyond Jeffersonville on the wrong side of the mountain. There is no honest way to append it to that day.

Where it does fit: Sunday morning. Skip Cold Hollow and Cabot, leave base at 8:00 over the Notch, do Jeffersonville and the VT-118 bridges, then join I-89 at St. Albans instead of Waterbury. It costs roughly 40 minutes against the planned route and swaps a cider mill for seven covered bridges. If covered bridges are what you came for, that is the better Sunday.

1. The drive. Roughly an hour and fifty each way from Hyde Park via I-89 — three and a half to four hours of transit out of a four-day trip, on a day that would have to give up either Stowe or the Kingdom to pay for it.
2. Sleepy Hollow Farm is closed to you. Pomfret and Woodstock have voted since 2023 to shut Cloudland Road to non-residents through peak foliage — the 2025 window ran 25 September to 16 October, with sheriff patrols directing 60% of enforcement there and parking bans alongside. October 1–4 sits squarely inside that window. The single image that makes people drive to Pomfret is the one thing you would be unable to reach.

Confirm the exact 2026 dates before dismissing it entirely — but plan on it being closed, because it has been three years running.

Five hours of driving to see a village green, on a trip whose whole logic is that the Northeast Kingdom peaks first and you are staying inside it. These belong to a southern-Vermont trip based around Woodstock or Manchester, in a different week. Manchester (~2 h 30) is cut on the same arithmetic.