Shoulder season: from mid-September the country belongs to the locals again

Lakes and seas give up their summer warmth more slowly than the air does. That is the whole trick of the shoulder season, and it can be checked: on the Baltic, the monthly mean water temperature is higher in September than in June. Go in the water in mid-September and you swim warmer than the person who came in early summer and shivered. Only without the company.

The sites empty over a single weekend

The change does not arrive gradually but with the end of the school holidays. Afterwards the same pitches stand free that were booked out in August, and sites that had only leftovers in summer take enquiries again for the coming weekend. If you can be flexible, you can now get places that would have needed six months' notice in July.

What else changes: the walk to the sanitary block is short, the space in front of the caravan is space again, and in the evening you no longer hear your neighbour, because there isn't one.

Autumn runs on a calendar

From around mid-September the red deer rut begins and runs into October. The stags leave their groups and gather at fixed rutting places, and you hear them long before you see them. The Darß with its chain of lagoons, the Nossentiner and Schwinzer Heide and the Müritz national park are the best-known destinations; the best window falls between late September and mid-October, early in the morning or in the last hour before dusk.

Shortly afterwards the cranes arrive. Coming from Scandinavia and eastern Europe, they gather at the same resting places as every year before moving on to France and Spain. Because they return so reliably, many of these places now have permanent viewing platforms. You do not need binoculars to hear them.

It gets dark early, and that is the point

In July you are still sitting in the dusk at half past ten. In October it is dark by seven, and with that the part of camping that the high summer cancels comes back: the hours by the fire, the early meal, the book by lamplight. On sites with fire rings, wood burns from September for the first time in months, because the evenings are finally cool enough for it.

What you take along

The shoulder season asks for a different packing list than August, and that is the only adjustment. A heater or at least a warm blanket, because the nights cool down markedly. Rubber boots, because there is dew on the grass in the morning. And a look at opening dates: some sites close at the end of October, some at the end of September, and the trekking site season ends in most places with October.

In return you get water that is still warm, forests just turning, and a site where you are the first one awake. For many people this is the real season, and they simply do not say so too loudly.