We were supposed to be in Puerto Vallarta.
Instead, we were in La Paz.
And if you had asked me that morning how I felt about that change, I probably would have given you a much less inspiring answer than the one I eventually came to believe.
This was one of those trips where the vacation itself was supposed to be pretty simple. Mommy-Daddy Carnival was the plan. The kids were staying with their grandparents, and Jenn and I had a few days to ourselves. We had driven from Salt Lake City to Bakersfield, then on to Los Angeles to catch the cruise. The itinerary had Cabo, Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán on it.
Then the weather decided it had other plans.
The cruise line rerouted us to La Paz.
A lot of people on the ship were pissed. And, honestly, I was pissed too. Puerto Vallarta was the place we had expected to visit, and now we were being dropped somewhere I knew basically nothing about.
But Jenn was better at it than I was.
She had a much more realistic attitude about the whole thing: we were still on vacation. We were still together. We were still getting off the ship and getting to see somewhere we’d never been.
That was the beginning of a lesson we’ve carried with us ever since.
Vacation is what YOU make of it.
The Problem With Everyone Going the Same Way
When we got off the ship, it would have been easy to do what everyone else was doing. Find the excursion. Follow the crowd. Get back to the ship. Complain about the port that wasn’t Puerto Vallarta.
Instead, Jenn and I decided we were going to make the best of it.
We took a shuttle into La Paz and started looking around. The landscape was dry and desert-like, and it immediately felt different from the beach destinations we were used to.
At some point we basically decided that if everyone else was turning right, we were going left.
That has become a bit of a theme for us when we travel. When we see a crowd of tourists heading one direction, we start wondering what’s the other direction.
This time, it worked out pretty damn well.
We Found Playa Balandra
One of the first things we ended up doing was kayaking at Playa Balandra.
And this was where La Paz started winning us over.
The water was ridiculously blue and clear. We saw sting rays. We found huge seashells. We drank cheap-ass Mexican beer. It was exactly the kind of unplanned vacation day that you don’t appreciate until you realize how different it could have been if you’d spent the whole day being pissed about the itinerary.
The beach wasn’t something we had researched. It wasn’t something we had planned months in advance. We hadn’t picked it because some travel website told us it was one of the ten best things to do in La Paz.
We were simply there.
And we were having a damn good time.
Lunch at a Shitty Little Mexican Café
Eventually we decided we were hungry.
There were plenty of tourists around, but instead of following everyone else toward the obvious places, we walked in the opposite direction.
We found a little Mexican café across from a plain, sandy beach.
It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t some hidden luxury restaurant with an oceanfront patio and a Michelin recommendation. It was basically a shitty little Mexican café with simple wooden tables and chairs and fishing nets hanging around as decoration.
And we loved it.
We sat down and ordered food and drinks and started doing what we had really come to do: experience the place instead of just checking it off a list.
Then a local guitarist showed up.
He had four fingers.
He played for us for a while, and it was one of those little moments that probably wouldn’t make anyone’s list of the top attractions in La Paz.
But we remember it.
After the guitarist left, something else happened that ended up changing the entire afternoon.
Our waiter started treating us differently.
Then the Waiter Started Talking to Us
At first, he was just our waiter.
But after the guitarist left, his demeanor changed. He started talking to us more. He seemed genuinely interested in who we were and where we were from, and we were interested in him.
He told us more about La Paz and his background. We talked about languages and travel and life.
And because we were willing to sit there and actually have a conversation instead of eating lunch and moving on to the next scheduled activity, the conversation eventually turned into tequila.
Not just any tequila.
We wanted to find a specific bottle.
The Tequila Quest
Our waiter gave us directions.
They were the kind of directions that make perfect sense when someone who lives there is giving them to you and sound completely fucking insane when you’re trying to remember them later.
Go down the alley.
Go about four blocks.
Look for the giant cow.
Find the grocery store.
Go inside.
Go to the third aisle.
Turn around.
Look down toward the bottom shelf.
Somewhere along the way, there was apparently a black leather pouch involved.
Sure as shit, we followed the directions.
And there it was.
We found the bottle.
We had gone wandering through La Paz, following directions from a guy we’d met at a little restaurant, looking for a bottle of tequila in a grocery store.
And the tequila was terrible.
Absolutely terrible.
But by then it didn’t really matter.
We had a story.
Then We Tried to Buy a Pastry
The tequila wasn’t the only thing we got wrong that day.
Later, we stopped at another tiny local shop because we saw something that looked good.
It was a little filo dough and cheese pastry wheel, and we wanted some.
There was just one problem: nobody spoke much English, and we were still figuring out the currency.
So we did what travelers have been doing since the beginning of time when nobody speaks the same language.
We pointed. We grunted. We nodded. We hoped for the best.
The guy told us how much it cost in pesos.
We were still learning the exchange rate, so we handed him what we thought was the right amount.
It wasn’t.
We had given him roughly ten times what he had asked for.
He immediately looked concerned.
He tried to explain what we’d done in Spanish. We tried to explain what we thought we’d done in English. Neither explanation was particularly effective.
Eventually another vendor who had stopped for lunch stepped in.
He understood what was happening, gave us most of our money back, and basically rescued us from accidentally paying ten times the price for a pastry.
Once again, we laughed.
The pastry was delicious.
And once again, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
And Then There Were the Tortillas
By this point, we had already had one of those days where every little decision seemed to lead to something else.
But we still had one more stop.
We found a tiny, dark little tortillaria.
We wanted some fresh tortillas.
The woman running the place didn’t want our American dollars. She wanted pesos.
We didn’t have enough.
So we went back to the grocery store to exchange money.
Then we came back.
And we got our tortillas.
Fresh. Warm. Salty.
It was such a simple thing, but it was one of the things I remember most clearly from the day.
We didn’t need a tour guide to tell us where to find it.
We didn’t need a five-star review.
We just had to be willing to walk around, get a little lost, ask questions, screw things up, and keep going.
The Ride Back to the Ship
By the time we got back to the shuttle, we were tired, happy, and probably a little drunk.
The shuttle was packed with people heading back toward the ship.
And I remember thinking about how differently our day had turned out from what we expected.
A lot of people had spent the day frustrated because La Paz wasn’t Puerto Vallarta.
We had spent the day kayaking, drinking beer, eating local food, meeting people, hunting down terrible tequila, accidentally overpaying for a pastry, exchanging money for tortillas, and generally wandering around without much of a plan.
We had turned a port change we didn’t want into one of the best stories from the trip.
Then We Heard About the Four Americans
After the trip, we saw news about four Americans who had been found buried outside La Paz.
That story stuck with me.
Not because I believe there was some connection between what happened to them and the choices we made that day. There wasn’t anything about our experience that suggested we were in immediate danger, and I don’t want this story to become some ridiculous lesson about how we bravely wandered into danger and survived.
That’s not what happened.
But it did reinforce something we already believe about travel.
Pay attention.
Know where you are. Pay attention to the people around you. Listen when locals or guides give you warnings. Don’t assume that because you’re on vacation nothing bad can happen.
And at the same time, don’t let someone else’s fear become your entire experience.
There is a balance between being smart and being afraid of everything.
We’ve learned that we can be cautious without being closed off.
Vacation Is What YOU Make of It
Looking back, the biggest thing I remember about La Paz isn’t the rerouted itinerary.
It’s the fact that we almost let the reroute ruin the day before the day even started.
I was pissed.
Jenn wasn’t nearly as bothered by it, and she helped me realize that we still had a choice.
We could spend the day wishing we were somewhere else.
Or we could figure out what was right in front of us.
We chose the second option.
And that choice led us to a beautiful beach, sting rays, cheap beer, a shitty little Mexican café, a four-fingered guitarist, a waiter who became our unofficial tour guide, a terrible bottle of tequila, a pastry we almost paid ten times too much for, and a tortillaria we never would have found if we’d stayed on the obvious path.
That’s the thing about travel.
A change of plans doesn’t necessarily mean ruined plans.
A wrong turn doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lost.
Sometimes the thing that looks like the worst possible outcome is actually the beginning of the story you’ll remember the longest.
We’ve learned to watch the masses.
When everyone turns right, we make a concerted effort to see what’s waiting on the left.
Because sometimes the wrong turn puts you on the best route.
And maybe that’s why the phrase we keep coming back to is the simplest one:
Vacation is what YOU make of it.
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