France

France is the rare destination that exceeds its own reputation. Every cliché about it — the bread, the wine, the light, the indifference of waiters in good restaurants — turns out to be true, and somehow none of it feels like a cliché when you are actually there. A croissant eaten standing at a zinc bar at 8am in Lyon, a glass of Burgundy poured by the vigneron who made it, an afternoon in a village market in the Dordogne where time appears to have stopped somewhere around 1975 — France keeps delivering these moments with an ease that suggests they require no effort at all. They do, of course. France is very good at hiding the work.

Paris is the obvious starting point, and it earns every superlative. But the France I keep returning to is the one beyond the capital. Provence in late June, when the lavender is just coming in and the markets overflow with tomatoes that taste like summer. The Basque Country, where Spain and France blur into something entirely its own, with food that rivals any in the world. Alsace, with its half-timbered villages and Rieslings that make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about white wine. Burgundy, best explored slowly by bicycle through the Côte d’Or, stopping at domaines that have been farming the same plots for centuries. The Atlantic coast at the Île de Ré, where the light is flat and northern and completely different from the south.

When to go: May to June or September. July and August are crowded and expensive, particularly in Paris and the south. September is perhaps the finest month — harvests beginning, tourists thinning, and the light turning golden earlier each evening.

What most guides get wrong: They treat France as Paris plus a day trip or two. The country is enormous and deeply regional — the food, the wine, the architecture, the temperament all shift dramatically as you move. Drive. Take the slow roads. Eat where there is no English menu. France rewards the traveler who comes to it on its own terms.