Districts in Your City, Ranked by Likelihood of Finding a Fudge Shop(pe) There

1. “Old town”

2. Boardwalk

3. Wharf (not all wharfs have boardwalks; a wharf is a man made docking area for boats and mag or may not include a wooden raised walkway for pedestrians and therefore require their own category)*

4. San Diego Gaslamp Quarter

5. “Fun” historical sex work district from Gold Rush/Victorian era. MAYBE Prohibition-era but no later, any later than that and sex work becomes contentious/“bad” again

6. Shopping arcade, Victorian era (will also sell giant cellophane-wrapped lollipops in a massive spiral of a single strand)

7. Ferry building

8. Near the zoo

9. City of Solvang

10. Historic mining district

11. Ghost town (anywhere)

12. Similarly, any part of town that offers ghost-specific walking tours

13. Winchester Mystery House section of San Jose**

14. Botanical garden district

15. Near the zoo

16. Possibly the airport, but only if it’s a quaint, relatively small airport that handles a lot of private air traffic. Odds increase for some reason if it’s called an “airfield”

17. Local rest stop, if the rest stop has something historically interesting (“interesting”) that takes it beyond the usual gas station/Subway/Taco Bell combo, like Billy the Kid’s grave or something

18. Whatever an “armory” is

19. Recently restored movie palace distract (recently being the 1970s)

20. If your town has a main drag where an old bank vault has been repurposed into a pretty popular diner, near there

21. Nonprestigious museum district

22. National park border town

Things to look for: A nearby body of water or low-cost, low-affect tourist attraction (nothing too posh or high-octane, fudge is a treat for whimsical budgeters — if it’s too exciting or expensive for a sixth-grade class trip, you’ve overshot the mark); anything plausibly “Victorian,” wooden walkways, cobblestones, or black-and-white tiles; weird museums that are the result of a single bequest from a local eccentric’s lifetime of hoarding rather than a curated collection from multiple artists; “curios”; small out-of-the way airfields; offbeat rest stops; historic homes available for tours during abbreviated hours like 10-2, Tuesday-Thursday.

Things to avoid: financial districts, non-historic city centers, major airports, prestigious museums, regular pavement, “downtown” anything, landlocked regions, the 100 percent corner, working waterfronts, commuter suburbs, the courthouse district, anything that might rightly be called “the main drag.”

*Unless it’s a saltwater taffy town instead. Some seafront towns will do both, a fudge/taffy combo, but just as often it’s a one-or-the-other kind of thing.

**I realize this list tilts heavily in favor of California because I grew up there but also I genuinely believe there’s a lot of fudge being sold in that state.