Getting snowed in is the best way to spend your vacation at this idyllic Vermont resort

(Photo/Andrew Rowat for Travel + Leisure)

There was snow in the trees as we crossed the Vermont state border — evidence, according to my ski aficionado husband, David, that a good-size winter storm had just blown through. Sure enough, when we pulled through the gates of Twin Farms, a storied resort near the town of Barnard, we found it swaddled in a fairy-tale blanket of fresh, foot-deep snow.

I’d never really seen the American winter from anywhere but the gritty sidewalks of New York City, where David and I live. When I was growing up on the southern coast of England, winters were mild, and snow, when it came, fell in inches, not feet. So as our host, a genial, bearded man named Kyle Rikert, showed us around Twin Farms, I felt as if I was experiencing the season fully for the first time.

Blue-tinged drifts framed each of the windows of the hotel’s main building — an 18th-century farmhouse, which the novelist Sinclair Lewis bought in 1928 as a gift for his then-fiancé, a journalist named Dorothy Thompson. Snow lay on its rooftop in thick swags. A nearby covered bridge was fringed with icicles the size of parsnips. Somewhere in the distance, geese flew over a frozen lake.