Lakeside BURLINGTON , Vermont's largest "city" with a population nudging forty thousand, is one of the most enjoyable towns in New England, a hip, relaxed fusion of Montral, eighty miles to the north, and Boston, over two hundred miles southeast. In fact, from its earliest days, Burlington looked as much to Canada as to the south. Shipping connections with the St Lawrence River were far easier than the land routes across the mountains, and the harbor became a major supply center. The city's founders included Ethan Allen and family far from being some impoverished Robin Hood figure, Ethan was a wealthy landowner, and his brother Ira set up the University of Vermont.

Burlington today is the definitive youthful, outward-looking university town. It's one of the few American cities to offer something approaching a caf culture, with a downtown you can stroll around on foot, especially around the Church Street Marketplace, and plenty of open-air terraces. Politically, too, it's unusual: Bernard Saunders, the former "socialist" mayor of Burlington, was in 1990 elected to the House of Representatives from Vermont the first political independent to go to Congress in forty years.