The Best Season Isn't High Season

Springtime in Paris has been selling books, movies and plane tickets for generations. Fall has its own version of France: grapes heavy on the vines, harvest underway, orchards filled with apples and pears, market stalls changing with the season, and hillsides beginning to trade summer green for the colors of fall.

Nobody needs much convincing that France can be wonderful in May or October. Yet when travelers start planning an active vacation, one question still comes up again and again: What's the high season?

Perhaps we're asking the wrong question.

High season tells us when a destination is most popular. It doesn't tell us when it is at its best. And popularity probably shouldn't rank very high among the reasons for choosing when to travel.

Popular isn't necessarily better

There are perfectly good reasons France is busy in summer. Families have school holidays, Europeans take their annual vacations, the days are long and the weather is warm. The result is also fairly predictable. Popular towns become crowded, roads get busier, restaurants fill, parking lots overflow, and the quiet riverside village you imagined sharing with a handful of locals may be sharing itself with several thousand other people who had exactly the same idea.

For some kinds of travel, you can work around that. For an active trip, it becomes part of the experience. If you're spending most of your day outdoors, moving through the landscape rather than jumping from one attraction to another, the season affects nearly everything: temperature, traffic, crowds, the river, the villages you stop in and even how inclined you are to linger over lunch rather than escape the midday heat.

That makes "When is everyone else going?" a rather strange way to choose your dates.

France from the river

Canoeing in France makes the difference particularly obvious. Picture a day on the Dordogne or Allier. You're not trying to get somewhere quickly; the river is the route. There may be a medieval village around the next bend, a château appearing through the trees on a hillside or limestone cliffs rising beside you. Somewhere along the way there will be a place to pull the canoe ashore, find lunch and sit beside the river for a while.

Put that same day into spring and the countryside is fresh and green, orchards are blooming and temperatures are comfortable for spending hours outside. Villages are awake, cafés and restaurants are open, but the great summer migration hasn't yet arrived.

Come fall, the countryside changes again. Fruit is being harvested, grapes are coming off the vines and markets reflect what is growing around them. Mornings are cooler, the light is different and the landscape is beginning to change color.

Then there is summer. The château is still beautiful, the village is still medieval and the river still flows beneath the same cliffs. There are simply a lot more people sharing all of them with you. The joke is you could cross the river using canoes as stepping stones and never get wet.

High season certainly changes an experience. Sometimes all it really does is make it busier.

Shoulder season is an unfortunate name

Even the language doesn't help. "Shoulder season" sounds suspiciously like a consolation prize, the period on either side of the real travel season when you might save some money if you're willing to accept that things won't be quite as good.

For many active trips, the opposite can be true. Spring and fall aren't compromises. They can offer the conditions that make being outside more enjoyable in the first place. Cooler temperatures matter when you're paddling for several hours. So do quieter roads when you're cycling. Fewer visitors change the feel of a small village far more dramatically than they change the feel of a large city.

Seasonal changes aren't something missing from the experience either. They are part of it. Fruit blossoms in spring aren't the lesser version of fruit hanging from the trees in fall. They're two different reasons to be there.

Choose the season for what you're going to do

This is how we have long approached scheduling trips at Pedalers. We don't begin by asking when a destination is most popular to visit and build our calendar around that. We look for the time of year that best suits the experience.

For a cycling trip, that might mean temperatures comfortable enough to spend most of the day riding. For walking, trail and weather conditions matter more than the month most people happen to take their vacation. For canoeing in France, we'd rather put you on the river when paddling, stopping, exploring and lingering outside all day make sense.

Sometimes that coincides with high season. Often it doesn't.

There are limits, of course. Go too far and you really are out of season. Restaurants close, weather becomes unreliable, days get short and local services disappear until next year. But between peak season and closed-for-the-season lies a rather appealing middle ground: the destination is fully alive without being overwhelmed.

That's the season worth looking for.

France already taught us this

Perhaps the oddest thing is that none of this should sound particularly radical. We already romanticize springtime in Paris. Nobody looks at an orchard covered in blossoms and complains that the fruit isn't ready yet. When fall arrives, vineyards and harvest markets become part of the very image of rural France.

We accept instinctively that a place changes with the seasons and that those changes can make it more interesting. Then somebody labels July and August "high season," and suddenly popularity becomes our measure of when we ought to go.

For an active traveler, there is a better question.

Don't ask when everyone else is going. Ask when you'll enjoy being there the most.