So far it’s looking like Sayulita probably isn’t the place for us.  One big factor is we seem to keep forgetting we’re not really beach people.  Kim and I both enjoy a visit to the beach, but every time we go to some tropical beach Kim and I both end up only wanting to be there for a day tops before we want to do something else.  It’s happened us in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Peru, Thailand, and Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and possibly other places I’m forgetting where we invariably end up heading for mountains or forests after a little bit of beach time.  I don’t think either of us are the kind of people who can just sit quietly in the sun or shade with or without a drink in hand while we watch the waves – and that was before we had kids.  Now going to the beach is controlled chaos where we’re trying to make sure the kids don’t drown and Ubu doesn’t run too far away or get into trouble while still switching off duties so we can take turns going in the water ourselves for brief periods. And then there’s the whole mess of after the beach you’re covered in salt and sand and just want to get somewhere to shower off and put on dry clothes.  Maybe we could get used to it if we took up surfing or something again like we did in Huanchaco Peru, but to do something like that we’d probably need to take turns or find someone to watch the kids and dog while we did.

Besides that, we’re not sure we can handle the atmosphere. 

We got here on a Sunday and the town was busy, and unfortunately busy with what appeared to be a lot of drunk and loud people.  And this is the low season, so we can’t imagine how crazy the high season is going to be.  However, apparently since we’re in low season the tourists that are here are more weekend party going types, whereas come November it’s going to be more chill people who own property, which sounds like a lot of Canadian retirees.  Sure enough, come Monday the town was almost dead relative to Sunday, but even so we’re not sure we can handle how crowded it’s going to get high season.  Some people told us for some weeks in December the power, water and sewer systems were so overtaxed that they didn’t work.

The prices are also another huge downside, since it appears that rentals here are more expensive than similar places in the US.  We want there to be something of an expat scene where we end up, but this place seems like it’s been overrun and overhyped at this point.  We’ve read that once you start asking around it’s possible to find cheaper long term rentals than the exorbitant prices you find online, but that doesn’t seem to be true anymore, at least not for a situation as complex as ours with a family and a dog.  Maybe still true if you’re single or a couple looking for a room.  Nobody wants to do long term rentals during the high season because just during the month of December people can charge as much or even a lot more per week as they can charge for a month during the low season, so they’re fine letting it sit vacant a bit during the surrounding months.  After days of looking we only saw 1 place that was even close to working for us, and it was $1500 per month not including utilities for a smallish 2 bed 2 bath house in a really boring location.  We even looked about 10 minutes north at San Francisco, known locally as San Pancho, and talked to some people there who said things weren’t any cheaper than in Sayulita, just the town was quieter.  We tried to look at some places there, but nobody ever called us back, which was a frequent occurrence in Sayulita as well.

And to top it all off we got sick here the last few days with the age old foe, traveler’s diarrhea.  That always puts a damper on your world view.  First I got it, but was feeling better after about a day.  Then Kim got it even worse with an accompanying fever that lasted through a night.  We’re guessing it might have been because we swam in the ocean at the town beach, which was dirtier than we expected, but it could be so many other things.  Oh, and it’s miserably hot here in the summer.  Everyone talks about how great it is in the winter and how some mornings you even need a sweatshirt, but it’s currently hot and humid on a level I’ve only experienced during the worst of an East Coast summer.  Thanks goodness our room has A/C, otherwise we would have left days ago, especially since during the time we’ve been sick we’ve been spending a lot of time hiding out in our room.

There are some major positives though that obviously make this place somewhere people want to go.  The town is interesting, and the surrounding areas are very pretty.  The people we’ve met, both online and in person are very friendly and helpful.  There’s an international school that looked really nice when we toured it, and the families we met there were very welcoming and nice.  Also, there’s fast Internet available, including a coworking space with fiber. Internet in Mexico isn’t slow by most people’s standards at between 5 and 15 Mbps download speed, but most people don’t consider upload speed as important as I do and that has been overall terrible at 1 Mbps if you’re lucky.  In Sayulita it’s possible to get 10 Mbps upload at your house and 40 Mbps at the coworking space, which doesn’t sound great compared to what you can get for big cities in the US, but it’s enough I could easily do what I need.  I’ve found I need an upload speed of at *least* 1.5 Mbps for comfortably doing things like video conferencing, screen sharing and synchronizing test databases.  Above all it has to be reliable, which is something else that’s been pretty hit or miss.  In fact as I write this I’m doing it in a text editor on my computer instead of online because the wifi at this rental goes in and out sporadically, as it

seems to in many places in Mexico.  Finally the food here seems pretty good and there’s plenty of vegetarian options.  Balancing things like fast Internet and good food with cheap prices where it’s not overrun by foreigners isn’t going to be easy, I just hope it’ll be easier to do than we’ve found it to be in Sayulita.

The next places to checkout on our list are:

1. Guadalajara – Known to have fiber internet available in places, lots of good food and prices online look pretty good for rentals, but it’s a really big city that might be overwhelming
2. Guanajuato – Medium sized college town that’s supposed to be pretty, but whether fast Internet is possible is questionable and we’re not sure about the school situation
3. San Miguel de Allende – Relatively small but with lots of expat influence which is both good and bad, we’ve read both, we’ll see if it feels anywhere near as overrun as Sayulita.  Prices appear reasonable, food looks good.

At this point those are mainly notes for myself to summarize our very light research. I’ll try to remember to do a post about the pros and cons of each place once we finally decide. I’ve been not working for over a month now, which means we’ve got less than a month left before we really need to be settled somewhere so I can pick up working again.  Even if I weren’t going back to work then, we’d want to be settled somewhere for awhile. This is probably one of the longest stints we’ve done with this much moving around, and that’s extra hard with kids and dog.  We’re still having a lot of fun, but we’re aware that the longer we go without some home base the closer to burned out we’re getting.  That might be a factor in choosing a place sooner rather than doing exhaustive research while visiting everywhere on our list.  In the end, we can’t find the perfect place since no place is, but we at the very least want to compare the highlands to the coast as options.