The Booking Calendar

The best trips in America are not expensive so much as early. The summer house books the previous August, the festival hotel a year out, the famous restaurant the morning its window opens, and the traveler who learns the calendar gets the same trip as the one who overpays in a panic, at a fraction of the cost and none of the compromise. Booking is not a chore attached to travel. Booking is the first act of the trip.

The calendar runs all year and mostly in the off season. January is for reserving summer islands, spring is for locking the fall foliage inns, August is for next year's beach house, and the great one-week events, the race meets, the market weeks, the festivals, keep their own schedules that the regulars carry in their heads and this series writes down.

The pieces in this series work destination by destination and season by season, stating the real windows plainly. Not the official ones, which are often generous, but the practical ones, past which the good rooms, the good boats, and the good tables are gone and the trip becomes a negotiation with what remains.

Set the reminders as you read, since the windows do not wait, and book in the correct order, which nearly always runs room, transport, then tables. The trip you want next year is on sale now, quietly. This series exists to tell you the date.