The Shoulder Weeks

There is a period on either side of every season when the place reasserts itself. The summer crowd has gone home, or has not yet arrived, and what remains is the town as the regulars have always known it, the tables available without a month of planning, the rates returned to something reasonable, the light at a lower angle that suits the geography better anyway. People who have been going to the same places for years understand this intuitively, even if they have never named it. The shoulder weeks are not the consolation prize for missing the season. They are, in many cases, the point.

This issue collects the places where that principle holds most reliably, where coming in October rather than August, or in April rather than June, is not a compromise but the correct arrival. The pieces below assume a reader who already knows what the place is, who has perhaps been before in the thick of it and is now ready to go back in the quieter configuration. The advice throughout is the kind that does not appear in the summary articles: which shoulder month is genuinely better rather than merely cheaper, where the regulars go when the summer rooms open up, what the town actually feels like when it is running for itself and not for the crowd.

The rhythm of a good shoulder trip is its own thing, unhurried in a way that high season rarely permits, with the restaurants glad to see you and the innkeepers willing to talk. The places in these pages have been receiving visitors long enough to know the difference between a guest and a tourist, and the shoulder weeks are when that distinction matters most. Come prepared to stay a day longer than planned. The places make a case for it.