every summer, The East Coast performs one of the country’s strangest migrations. Not the people – the season itself. In June, Palm Beach’s maids sit half-empty as rates at some of Florida’s top resorts drop to a fraction of their winter peaks. For travelers willing to trade weather for serious value postcards, it’s one of the best arbitrage opportunities in American luxury. Then summer begins its slow climb north.
By July, beach chairs start filling up along the Carolinas, where long afternoons are spent on shrimp boils, dock cocktails and swamp sunsets. A few weeks later, the Hamptons enter their annual competitive parking exercise, ferry to Nantucket AND Martha’s Vineyard start selling and Cape Cod traffic reports become their regional weather forecast. Since August, New England has become the place Americans have spent all year imagining, when lobster rolls taste better simply because they’re eaten outside, linen jackets finally make meteorological sense, and no one thinks about wearing a plush sweater after dinner.
The Atlantic has always offered a more diverse idea of wine than its western counterpart. While the Pacific keeps most of the coastline in climatic balance from San Diego to Seattle, the East Coast reinvents itself every few hundred miles. A weekend in the Florida Keys shares little with one in Kennebunkport, just as the tidal Lowcountry of Charleston has almost nothing in common with the clipped hedges of Nantucket or the Gilded Age porticoes of Watch Hill. The best hotels reinforce these differences. Some preserve generations of old money rituals, others embrace barefoot ease or clean contemporary design, but those worth crossing state lines for cannot exist anywhere else. Here, we follow summer as it makes its way across the Atlantic, stopping at the resorts that dot each stretch of coastline along the way.
