Reserve a dated departure with a Kansas City travel agent, month by month across twenty six windows

Reserve a dated departure with a Kansas City travel agent and the first thing you choose is a week, not a country. Twenty six departures run in the year ahead and each carries a real window, from a single morning in January to a season that stays open eight months. All twelve months hold something. The links below go to the month pages, and each page carries the departures that run inside it with the length, the window and the figure on one line.

Twenty of the twenty six sit inside one month and appear nowhere else. Five months carry exactly one of those twenty: January, February, March, November and December. Six months carry two. June carries three. The other six departures run for most of the year and turn up on eight or nine of the twelve pages, which is why a thin month still has something in it. Underneath that count is a second one, and it decides how hard a week is to get. Five departures run once and once only. Seven give you a handful of starts inside one named week. Eight take weekly starts through a single month. Six accept nearly any week inside a long season.

The five dates that do not come round twice

Senja on 17 January. The river mouth at Tulcea on 13 April. Hoga Kusten on 22 June. The Pirin range from 17 to 24 October. A week on a barrier island off the Georgia shore in December. Each is built on something that happens on those days and not in the fortnight either side: the sun coming back over a horizon it left in November, birds arriving in a delta on their own schedule, the shortest night of the year at 63 degrees north, larch turning gold at altitude, and a December week when the daily visitor cap on a limited entry island is barely tested. Miss one and the honest answer is next year rather than next month.

Where the year is contested, and what contests it

June holds three departures because three unrelated things land at once: the Adriatic bay weeks begin on Saturdays before the coast road fills, Orkney runs weekly while the light is long, and the midsummer date on the Swedish coastline is one night that will not be moved. Mid July is tighter in a narrower way: the apricot week on the Austrian Danube and the high passes in Ladakh both start inside the same seven days, 12 to 18 July, because a harvest and a road that clears late leave nothing to negotiate with. September holds two, five starts inside one week in Finnish Lapland as the ground color turns and weekly starts on Hokkaido while the same thing happens on the other side of the hemisphere.

Which weeks are hard to get is arithmetic first. A departure with one date has one week to give. A named week with four starts has four. A month of weekly starts has four or five, and a long season has thirty odd. That is also the order in which the year closes, so if one of the five fixed dates is why you are here, settle it first and arrange the flexible weeks around it. the sequence from a note to a booking sets out what settling it involves at this end.

What a shoulder week changes besides the figure

A good part of this board sits outside the weeks when the same places are full. February on the Colombian coffee slopes, March on an Estonian island in the thaw, June rather than August on the Montenegrin bay, October rather than July on the Ionian shore of Calabria. What that buys is three things. The rooms are the small houses that have nothing free in high summer. The roads carry local traffic instead of a summer's worth of it, which on a single lane road with passing places is the difference between driving and queuing. And the figure against a departure is the figure for its own month, because each one is priced for the window it runs in; every row on every departure on the board keeps the two on one line.

The trade is weather with a wider range. A shoulder week can hand you eight clear days or five wet ones, and each departure page says which way its month usually goes.

Three weeks of leave, laid against this board

If you have three weeks and no fixed idea, there is an order that holds up better than picking three places you like. Take the thing that runs once, if one of the five fixed dates is what you actually want, and build the year around it. Put the second week in a month of weekly starts, where a Saturday can still be moved either way after your leave is approved. Keep the third in the long season group, where the window is months rather than days, and let it absorb whatever work does to the other two.

Nothing on this board belongs to Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC. This is a booking office in the Kansas City metro that takes your request, places the reservation with the company running the departure, and stays in the correspondence while the questions get answered. That company bills you directly on its own paperwork and pays this office a commission after you are home. Getting yourself to the start point is your own arrangement, and no figure on this board carries it. Every request is answered within one business day. What can be changed once a reservation is placed is set out at the terms for moving or cancelling, and what people ask before sending anything is answered at the questions people actually ask. When you know the month, what to put in a request is where it begins.