I started with an Orvis Madison 5wt years ago and loved it. My favorite is a 4wt 7.5 ft. custom Two piece that I use exclusively on the small New England streams. The action and feel is incredible. Also have a Winston 5w Brackett and an old Payne 5w. The closest graphite i have in terms of feel similar to a good bamboo rod is a Winston Tom Morgan Favorite that is an 8ft/ 4wt. The rest of my rids are various weights of Orvis and Winston, Orvis being quite popular here in the Northeast and not too bad depending on style. I also don't like many of the Winston graphite/boron rods, but do like the IM7 based rods. They have much better feel.
I love to fish the Appalachians down in Tennessee, North Carolina, and West Virginia, all the way up to the PA border.. That's where pocket water is king, and I love it. My two favorite pocket water rigs right now are a Scott G series rod in 3 weight (7 foot), and a Loomis Triology in 2 weight (8 foot). I will be playing around with a 11'6" Tankara rod this spring (might get the 13' one instead) as this might be the killer rod for pocket water. I used a 13' one last summer for about an hour, and caught a bunch of fish on a home brew green rock worm. You litterally toss it out there and let it do it's own thing in the current. The system is cheap, and there's no reel to mess with. The actually flyline is about eight inches long and made from the back end of an old piece of two weight flyline with an Orvis loop attached to it. The leaders are kinda specialized in they are very long (10' to 16' being the norm). In otherwords the perfect pocket water system. The whole rod collapses down to about 20", so it's easy to take up into the higher elevations and can be ready to fish in about three or four minutes!
Have been planning a trip up your way for about a year now. Want to fish the Catskills one more time and then move on up to the Finger Lakes region. After I'm done with that I want to head east into Vermont and New Hampshire following the Connecticut River up into Maine. Then head east over to the Rangely area. Brother in law has an RV we can operate out of, and I think it would be neat two and a half week trip up there (maybe even a month). In the past I always did a long trip out west. Starting up near Chalma New Mexico and finishing out in Montana, stopping here and there along the way. I even had three or four places I fished on the way back home. Seemed like every year I found two or three new rivers to explore the next year. Have fished a little bit in California, and kinda want to do that one again.
gary