Cape Cod to the White Mountains, for the turning leaves

New England earns its reputation for autumn colour honestly, and the reason is mostly botanical. The region's sugar maples, in particular, produce an unusually vivid red as chlorophyll breaks down in the shortening days of autumn, revealing pigments that are present in the leaf all summer but masked by green until the season turns. Combine that with beech, birch and oak in supporting shades of gold and copper, across hillsides steep enough to view from below rather than only from above, and the effect really is more vivid than most people expect before they have seen it themselves.

The coast first

A typical route through the region starts on the coast rather than in the hills, since Cape Cod and the islands offshore, Martha's Vineyard among them, hold a different kind of interest: weathered shingle villages, working harbours, and beaches that empty out considerably once the summer crowds leave in September. Newport, Rhode Island, further along the coast, adds a sharp change of register: a cluster of enormous late-nineteenth-century summer houses built by some of America's wealthiest families of the Gilded Age, more palace than cottage despite what their original owners called them.

Plymouth, where New England's story starts

Several routes through the region also take in Plymouth, on the coast south of Boston, where the Mayflower's passengers came ashore in 1620 after a difficult Atlantic crossing and founded the second permanent English settlement in what would become the United States. Roughly half of the original hundred or so settlers did not survive their first winter, and the colony's early years were marked as much by dependence on the knowledge of the Wampanoag people already living in the region as by any self-sufficiency of their own. The harvest celebration held the following autumn, later mythologised into the modern Thanksgiving holiday, is a considerably more complicated story than the popular version usually allows, and the plainer facts of the colony's precarious early survival are, if anything, more interesting.

Inland, where the colour actually is

The foliage itself is mostly an inland phenomenon, at its most concentrated across New Hampshire's White Mountains and neighbouring Vermont, where narrow roads climb through Franconia Notch and similar passes between forested slopes that turn, over the course of a few weeks, from green to a patchwork of red, gold and orange. Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire's largest lake, offers water-level views of the same colour change reflected across its surface, a gentler contrast to the steeper mountain roads nearby.

Timing it, and why that's harder than it sounds

Peak foliage moves south and downhill as the weeks pass, starting in northern New Hampshire and Vermont in late September and reaching southern New England by mid-to-late October, but the exact timing shifts from year to year depending on temperature and rainfall, and no operator can guarantee a specific week will coincide with the very best colour. What can be relied on is the general window: late September through October gives a reasonable chance of catching some stage of the change somewhere along a route that covers this much ground.

Extending north and west

For travellers wanting more than New England alone, an extended version of the route continues into Canada, taking in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto before crossing to Niagara Falls and finishing in New York. The New England, Canada and New York in the Fall itinerary follows this longer path, adding a second country's autumn colour, and a rather different urban character, to the same seasonal window.

Either way, the season itself is the whole point of travelling here in autumn rather than summer, and it is worth planning around it rather than treating the colour as an incidental bonus. Pack layers rather than a single heavy coat: mornings in the White Mountains can be genuinely cold while afternoons on the coast often remain mild, sometimes within the same day.