Having revealed our inner cheapskates in a recent Globe Travel piece not only got us a slew of hate mail (sample eloquence: “PIGS! PIGS! PIGS!”). It also garnered a lot of thank-yous and some suggestions for additional cost-cutting. One reader called our attention to the relatively new website BerkshireCoupon.com http://berkshirecoupon.com. While it’s primarily aimed at cost-conscious residents of Berkshire County, some of the online coupons are very useful for leaf-peepers and other travelers, especially the discounts on hotels, motels, and restaurants. Who knows? That $20 off motorcycle service could also come in handy.

Posted by Patricia Harris and David Lyon, Globe Correspondents

This is the perfect weekend for early foliage viewing, especially up at the top of the Toll Road above Equinox Mountain outside Manchester, Vt. This is the highest peak in southern Vermont and the view is unlimited, stretching from New York to Quebec, from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. By Columbus Day Weekend the brilliant foliage here is often gone. All this talk about foliage is just to get you to the 17th Annual Hildene Fall Arts Festival, in Manchester, this weekend. The festival features 200 booths showcasing art, crafts and specialty foods at scenic Hildene’s Meadow. Visitors can enjoy fresh food, live entertainment, and a unique Vermont beer, cheese and sausage tent. For more information, visit online.

Photo courtesy Lee Krohn

If you missed “Frogs – A Chorus of Colors” at Boston's Museum of Science, you can catch them at the Berkshire Museum through Nov. 1.
You'll learn about electric blue frogs, frogs that tip the scales at seven pounds, and others that are only a half inch long. Tree frogs, bullfrogs, horned frogs, giant toads, and dart poison frogs are all part of the exhibit. You'll hear recorded frog calls, see frog videos, even get a chance to perform a virtual frog dissection.
“It’s an ideal opportunity for children and families to explore the astounding world of frogs in galleries transformed into an oasis of peaceful waterfalls and a symphony of song. Everyone will be able to get to know some of the earth’s most fascinating creatures in an up-close and personal way,” executive director Stuart A. Chase said in an e-mail.
There is an additional fee for the exhibit. Admission for adults is $11, $6 children ages 3-18, and $1 for museum members.

Mother’s Day is only one day (May 10), but the Mother-Daughter Spa Getaway at Cranwell Resort, Spa and Golf Club in Lenox is going for two months, May 1-June 30. Costing $410 per person, this new package includes two nights in a superior room, one 50-minute spa service per person, one 22-minute treatment per person, a Spa Cafe lunch for two, a dinner for two at the on-site Sloane’s Tavern, unlimited fitness classes, and full use of spa facilities.
Visit www.cranwell.com or call 800-272-6935.

Posted by Richard P. Carpenter

Ever since I read "My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod -- the World's Most Grueling Race" (the book is better than the title, by the way) I have been fascinated with dog sledding. If you're itching to be pulled along by friendly Siberian huskies from the Arctic Paws dog sled team, learn the art and history of mushing, and take a turn at controlling the team on a short ride, Stone Hill Center in Williamstown is hosting Family Day, an afternoon of dog sledding, snowshoeing, snow sculpting, and sledding on Jan. 25 from 12:30-3:30. There will be a campfire and hot chocolate - and hopefully, snow. (Lack of snow will cancel the event; check online or call 413-458-2303 to confirm.) All the activities and admission to art galleries are free. Stone Hill Center, which opened in June, is part of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. It houses art galleries and the Williamstown Art Conservation Center.

Having wished for some time that this country were in a different shape – that is, its political intelligence, its health insurance system, its educational structure, its leaders, its women, its Congress, its media (reading this with Fox News on in the background, eh?), its infrastructure, its nuclear waste sites, its polar bears and wolves (the four-legged kind, though now we all have to worry about the Wall Street species, too), oh, I could go on – here next to me is a book to inspire the perfect question for our so-called presidential debaters (so-called because in an actual authentic genuine real debate, you are expected to provide an actual authentic genuine real answer to the question) this week: How did the states get their shapes? And when both of them say, uhhh, well, uhhh, gee, that’s not on my playlist, they would be allowed to answer the variation: How have the states gotten into the shapes they are in: suffering from divisions along class lines, unemployment, ill health, mediocre education, alienation from the above-named anointed estates, but thrilled to see the band put the dot on O h i o on any given Saturday.

“How the States Got Their Shapes” by Mark Stein (Collins, 332 pp., illustrated, hardcover, $22.95) might be just the tranquilizer one needs when trying to comprehend US history, be it in the making or made already. Take Ohio. Imagine it before coal mines and marching bands.

My pal Sam loves to talk about how much money he's saved by buying a Honda Civic hybrid. So I plan to turn my boy onto Cost2Drive, a new webapp that estimates the fuel cost of any given trip. This is the way it works:

Say, you're planning a drive to P-town this weekend and you live in JP. You go to the site; enter your starting point and destination, the year of your car, along with make and model.
Cost2Drive uses your car's MPG, gleaned from the EPA. They then grab the average price of gas in your area from Oil Price Information Service, and bang it all up against and the distance, which comes via Google map technology, to "galculate" your cost.
After plugging my data into Cost2Drive I learn that getting to P-town in my 1999 Subaru Forester (stop laughing; it's a cool ride) will set me back $15.04; Sam, on the other hand, will only have to pony up $8.60.
Obviously, this calculation isn't high-level math so you could easily do it yourself. But if your car's EPA isn't tattooed to your forearm and if you aren't fully conversant in the current average price of a gallon of petrol in your hood and you want to know whether it makes the most financial sense to drive, take the train or just Fung Wah (or just be green and stay home), this app is worth a try. Besides it's fun.
Thanks to Riverwired for pointing us to this one.

Western Massachusetts is such a hotbed for fine artisans and varied crafters, and this time of year, the region is flooded with new talent, familiar faces, and much excitement. This weekend, July 4-5, is set for Great Barrington's Berkshires Arts Festival where over 175 juried artists gather to show and sell their wares.

The Festival is geared for families too with live demonstrations and workshops for both adults and children, great food, and plenty of live music. The opportunity to meet and speak with so many talented artists and craftspeople is an inspiring experience. The show is held under large outdoor tents, and in Ski Butternut's lodge. Held rain or shine, the festival is worth the drive out to the Berkshires.

Adults pay $10, seniors $9, and students $5. Children under 10 are free and a weekend pass is available for $13 if you plan on seeing all the festival has to offer - and it will take 2 days! Hours are Friday, July 4, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Sunday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Want to stay a while? Visit the Berkshire Visitors Bureau for lodging information. And take a peek at last year's show here.

April showers bring May flowers, of course, but up higher, the greenest of leaves. These shades inadequately captured by a point and shoot camera the other day on a drive from Amherst to Athol. The palette was deeper and sharper, crawling up into distant hills, when seen with the naked eye. Looks like a bumper crop coming this fall...

If you haven't been training, then it may be a little late for this weekend's 7 Sisters Trail Race in Amherst. As the race website promises:

"Very scenic overlooks of the Pioneer Valley with views of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, Hampshire College and the Town of Amherst, as well as a beautiful view of the Connecticut River and Northampton to the west."

Only problem is, those views come while humping up and down very rocky terrain for 12 miles.

If you need a bit more time to get in shape, there're always the races at the Pineland Farms Trail Challenge, in New Gloucester, Maine.

Those races are bit longer, at 25 kilometers, 50 kilometers, and 50 miles. And as the web site warns: "The trails are wide and non-technical, but very hilly. Although there are no major climbs the rolling terrain is unrelenting."

Happy trails...

Passengers flying out of Bradley International Airport will be able to fly directly to Memphis this summer.

Bradley and Northwest Airlines are announcing that daily nonstop seasonal service to Memphis International Airport will begin on June 16.

The chairman of the airport's board of governors says the value of this new service will be further multiplied because passengers can use it to connect to other flights offered by Northwest Airlines at Bradley.

Northwest says the daily flights to Memphis, complement daily service to Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Indianapolis and Amsterdam.

The service will be operated by Northwest Airlink partner Pinnacle Airlines using 50 seat jets. (AP)

A friend of mine once pointed out how vulnerable people seem to be when watching movies in an airplane. Big beefy guys tearing up during romantic comedies. Giddy laughter at suspect jokes. Something about sitting 35,000 feet above the earth, my friend suspects, changes how you see things.

So maybe it's not quite as dramatic to sit in a theater on the other side of the state, or then wander unfamiliar streets afterward, but something about that also makes you consider films differently. Far from home and stripped of the daily distractions of life's routines, you connect more directly to what is being said and shown. You incorporate more - if even only for a few moments - the film's ideas into your own.

That's what I found, anyway, on a recent roadtrip through western New England in search of independent cinemas. You can learn about the adventures of this one-person rolling film festival and the theaters where it played out this weekend in The Boston Globe and online at boston.com's travel site.

But you won't read about what happened on a dark and cold Thursday evening after I sat through a late-afternoon showing of "No Country for Old Men." The film features plenty of violence. Afterward, alone in streets and shops, I had the unsettling sensation of how committing a murder might feel. I wrote in vivid detail about that moment in an early draft of the cinema story. That scene, understandably, ended up on the editing room floor.

Not looking forward to braving long lift lines at some of the busier ski areas in New Hampshire and Vermont? Been there, done that. So head west instead: Hawk Mountain Lodge in Charlemont is offering a ski-and-stay package, with the skiing at nearby Berkshire East Ski Resort. The lodge is a renovated 1800s farmhouse with five rooms, and prices range from $55–$125 per room per night. You get a $5 discount off a daily lift pass and 10 percent off a meal at Stillwaters Restaurant. Family-friendly Berkshire East offers plenty of terrain with more than 45 trails and five lifts. And it recently added a snow tubing park, which opened Dec. 26. Wheee!

You're stuck in Rutland and it's Cold. And Dark. You're thinking about gnawing off your right paw (make that the left; you write with your right one).
The only thing that's getting you through is a dim and distant dream that some day when the sun returns you'll be able to snag a cheap JetBlue flight to see the A's in the East Bay. Well, today your dream has come true, and it didn't involve Publisher's Clearinghouse, dudes with video cameras, or a big fake check with your name misspelled in cursive.
The good folks at the Rutland Herald say that thanks to partnership agreements with Cape Air, folks in Rutland can book flights between there and the 15 domestic JetBlue destinations that connect with Cape Air at Logan.
So oil that glove and sing: "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades....''

Here’s a little stocking stuffer for kids with a geographic bent: ‘‘Nicholas: A Massachusetts Tale’’ by Peter Arenstam (Mitten Press, $14.95). The chapter book tells the story of a field mouse on a family quest across the Bay State. Along the way, he befriends a chipmunk and other creatures who not only do not eat him but also teach him something about the area he’s exploring (the Berkshires, Quabbin Reservation, Wachusett Mountain, Gloucester, Boston, Plymouth, and Martha’s Vineyard). The illustrations by Karen Busch Holman are elegant and sweet without being overly precious. (As non-precious as a book about a talking mouse can be, anyway.) It’s the first in a 4-part series of ‘‘Nicholas’’ books starring Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. (Sorry Rhode Island and Connecticut!)

At Crane Beach, the property managed by The Trustees of Reservations at the eastern edge of Massachusetts, there are sand and sea and darting plovers. A run through summer dunes brings slipping, slogging steps up and down open slopes.

A world away and yet only at the western side of the state, there is Field Farm, another Trustees property, home to hay fields and, in summer, strong-winged bobolinks, yellow-capped birds that travel across the equator to avoid winter winds.

At the ocean's edge, wind gusts flat and strong. In the Berkshire valley tucked beneath Mount Greylock, the state's highest peak, it does that too. But it also breaks, suddenly, into chaotic twists and turns shaped by contours of the land.

It is a striking place to go after spending time in the settled world. Over the past three days, I've driven crowded highways, passing in and out of bustling towns, stopping to watch films set in the music-filled streets of New York, the dust-blown desert of India, and the corn-fed fields of Iowa.

This morning, 12 degrees and bright sun, bobolinks long gone from Field Farm and Greylock's summit looming clearly, not the sea, I set out on a run. Snow, not sand, gave way beneath each step, as mid-morning warmth softened the surface. The "South Trail" traced a frozen pond, an open field, then ducked into woods. Tiny tracks crossed my path.

I ran another mile deeper among the leafless trees and, as at the ocean's edge, found solitude, and strength.

Admit it. Your nerves take a beating when you live in Boston. To fight the stress levels, a personal suggestion is to chill out occasionally at the Kripalu Yoga Retreat in the Berkshires, located on the Stockbridge line right across from Tanglewood. I’ve been going once or twice a year for many years and while the prices have gone up (not on a par with nearby Canyon Ranch, but certainly more than they used to be), the quality has gone up as well.
I stopped by for a recent massage at the site’s health center (you don’t have to stay at Kripalu to book their services) and was immediately transported by a masseur named Umesh, a true character who has also run Kripalu’s off-and-on, chartered hikes to the Himalayas. We discovered that we were born five days apart, but the main thing was that I left with a refreshed outlook, ready to tackle the city again.
Oh, and the food is great there, too. And they even serve coffee in the cafe. That’s a long way from when I first went to Kripalu when they were based in rural Pennsylvania 25 years ago and the men had to stay in a huge barn with an outhouse, and no caffeine was allowed.
File under: Yoga retreats adapt to the times.

Posted by Steve Morse, Globe correspondent

Spencer Finch's "What Time Is It On the Sun?" at MassMOCA has drawn a buzz from the contemporary arts crowd. But any dedicated traveler would benefit from a trip to North Adams before the show closes on March 31, 2008.

Finch's cerebral meditations on environments actually offer some down-to-earth hints on how to really pay attention and more fully experience a place. I'd never thought much about the breezes at Walden Pond, for example, until I stood in Finch's semicircular installation of box fans programmed to approximate the wind speed and direction during a particular two-hour period.
A framed pastel rendering of the color of the ceiling above Sigmund Freud's couch is a quirky reminder to look for the offbeat detail that defines a place.
In a burst of simple genius, Finch placed colored panels in the panes of the wall of glass in the Duncan Brown Family Gallery. When the sun shines through, it's like walking into a candle flame. I always light a candle when I visit a church (it just makes me feel good and it's a way to make a small donation). Next time I'm in a dimly lit cathedral, I'll remember Finch's pure enveloping light.
MassMOCA is open Wednesday through Monday 11-5.

Posted by Patricia Harris, Globe correspondent

Life is pretty laid-back in the Berkshires, but the region also boasts one of the most cutting-edge museums in the world. It's Mass MoCa in North Adams and it is located in old, renovated, industrial-brick buildings that provide huge amounts of space for some of the most intriguing installations you'll ever see.
On display for the next two years is Anselm Kiefer's bewildering concrete sculpture, "Etrois sont les Vaisseaux,'' which basically looks likes curled-up chunks of urban sidewalk, running in a long row that makes it seem like buckled parts of a bridge. I've certainly never seen anything like it.
There's also Spencer Finch's mix of colored glass panels that filter light into a kind of psychedelic kaleidoscope. Very trippy and you can sit on benches in front of it and start hallucinating, if you like. No need for LSD.
Overall, this is a fabulously surreal museum. It also offers concerts, some of them in the B-10 Lounge (complete with couches), where the Jazz Passengers perform on Nov. 17. The galleries are open every day except Tuesday, and admission is $12.50 for adults.
In addition, the museum has a cool cafe (called the Lickety Split Cafe) in one of its industrial buildings; and there's a more stylish restaurant, Cafe Latino, right next door.

Posted by Steve Morse, Globe Correspondent