The Full Week

Some places cannot be visited. They can only be inhabited, briefly, and the difference is measured in nights. The full week is the oldest luxury in travel, older than any hotel, and it remains the only cure for a particular modern ailment, which is arriving somewhere magnificent and leaving before your pulse has adjusted to it. The places in this edition all ask for seven nights, and they all pay the fare back with interest.

The full week changes the arithmetic of a trip. The first two days are spent arriving, in the larger sense, and the last one packing, so a weekend somewhere far leaves nothing in the middle. Seven nights leaves four or five days of actually being there, which is when the good things happen, the routine that forms, the swimming hole or the fishing bend or the beach chair that becomes, temporarily, yours.

This edition goes to three places built for the long stay. A private ranch in Montana's Paradise Valley, where the days organize themselves around horses and water and the evenings around a fire, Maui, which punishes the three-night visitor with its distances and rewards the week with its range, and Sea Island, where Georgia families have been taking the same seven nights for a hundred years.

Book the week and defend it. Decline the temptation to split it between two places, since splitting is just two short trips wearing a disguise. Go far, stay put, and come home changed slightly, which is what the full week has always been for.