“It sounds nice,” my husband said over FaceTime. “Let me see?”
I’d been dreading this moment since the second our taxi rolled up to the property. It was one thing to take my daughter on a vacation of her own while her father and brother spent spring break at a debate tournament in eastern Pennsylvania. But the trip had come together in a flurry, and while I knew there was no question who would end up winning the boys vs. girls vacation challenge, I hadn’t realized the margin would be quite so obscene.
The view from the balcony of my private treehouse at the One&Only Mandarina didn’t exactly support my repeated branding of this as a “beach trip to Mexico.” Louisa and I were playing house in a mountainside villa that was perched on 80-foot stilts above the jungle floor. To the right: misty mountaintops and more dense, lush jungle. To the left: the Pacific Ocean, only two swimmers visible in the blue expanse. Hesitantly, I pressed the flip button to show my husband what he was missing.
“And there’s the ocean,” he said. “Your room’s kind of far from it, though.”
He was wildly off the mark, but he was also thousands of miles away, and he didn’t need to know the details. Like the fact that we had a butler. Okay, fine. We had two butlers.
Say what you will about my vacation-planning skills (book now, research later), but it wasn’t entirely my fault that I’d come here so unprepared. Mexico’s Nayarit peninsula has a bit of a branding problem. The spate of luxury properties opening along the coast speaks to the area’s boom. Next year, when the $535 million expansion underway at Puerto Vallarta Airport’s Terminal 2 is complete, it will double passenger capacity by 2027. “It’s the new Tulum for people who used to love Tulum,” a globetrotting friend explained.
