• 1. Where to Stay
• 2. Where to Eat
• 3. What to Do
• 4. Insider’s Tip
• 5. An Oddball Day

The Inn at Starlight Lake    (Photo: Courtesy of Brad M. Stern)

Launch your leaf-peeping expedition from the Inn at Starlight Lake (from $100), which hugs the eastern edge of the Endless Mountains, encompassing Susquehanna and Wyoming Counties, as well as Bradford and Sullivan Counties to the west. Its fifties heyday is still charmingly apparent in the clapboard façade, ping-pong-outfitted game room, and sleepy, flickering lobby. Fortunately, the rooms have gotten more recent updates, and now feature king-size beds, thick comforters, and private baths.

Relive the family-resort vacations of your youth by challenging the kids to some horseshoes or miniature golf at the Stone Bridge Inn in Union Dale. Many of the rooms (from $95) look out on Elk Mountain—a ski resort in winter; a crazy quilt of red, orange, and gold foliage in autumn—with old-fashioned tie-back curtains framing the views.

If you prefer village over mountain living, book a night in the Rosemont Inn Bed & Breakfast (from $105). This redone Victorian mansion (local gossips say its renovation cost a cool million) is just a block from the village green in Montrose, and the Clock Tower Room in the connected carriage house looks right on the Back to the Future–style courthouse clock.

Published on September 25, 2007 as a web exclusive.