Let me get something out of the way first. There are approximately one million blog articles about Sayulita, Mexico. Best tacos, best cocktails, most Instagrammable streets, cutest boutique hotels. It’s a well-documented town and I am not going to add to that pile. This is just my story of living in Sayulita and the surrounding area and what keeps me coming back.
What I can tell you — eating a taco I got in town today, sitting in my apartment with a breeze coming through the window — is what three months here actually looks like when it’s not a vacation. When it’s your life for a season. And more specifically what it’s looked like across four years of coming back, each time from a different place, each time needing something different from it.
How I Get Here
I fly out on New Year’s Eve. Cheap flights, usually first class, and before you close this tab let me explain.
The average one-way flight runs around $200. First class on the same route is $400-500 (not the case with all routes but year after year I have found this rate consistent). I fly with my bike every year — airlines treat bikes like a personal inconvenience and charge $100-150 in fees on a regular ticket, sometimes more. First class gives me two free bags at 70 pounds each, plus lounge access on my layover which means free food instead of $18 airport sandwiches. When I do the actual math the price difference mostly disappears and I arrive without the luggage stress.
It sounds bougie. The math makes it logical.
The bike is non-negotiable for me. It changes how I move around entirely — surf breaks, trails between towns, places slightly off the beaten path that would otherwise require paying for transportation constantly. That said if you come without one the bus from Puerto Vallarta airport to Sayulita is genuinely easy, cheap, and nothing like the horror story people imagine. Friends from Vail used to insist I take a private car service for $150 each way. I’ve taken the $3 bus many times. It’s fine.
Year One: I Thought I Was Moving and Living in Sayulita Permanently
The first time I came I genuinely thought I was moving to Mexico permanently. That was the plan — get a job, build a life, stay. What actually happened was I arrived, spent two weeks barely leaving my apartment, slowly found my surf instructor, learned to ride waves badly, and then ended up deciding to go back to Vail for the summer because the money was good and someone I cared about was there.
So that first season was really me learning I could be alone in a foreign country and be okay. I figured out how to get a bike here, how to navigate to the surf breaks, how to find food, how to fill a day without structure and slowly learning spanish. Basic independence in an unfamiliar place. I was partially embracing it and partially holding back, unsure if I was staying or going.
Spoiler: I went. And then I kept coming back.
Year Two: The Tranquility Season
After leaving Mexico my boyfriend and I decided to come back to Vail again for a money grab summer before figuring out next steps. When the summer ended neither of us knew what we wanted. He had adventures planned. I landed back on Mexico. We tried long distance.
That season I lived further outside of town — a different area, quieter, requiring a seven mile bike ride on hilly roads to reach the surf break. I was still learning to surf so I’d go three or four days a week, bike out in the morning, surf for two hours, bike back exhausted and happy. My legs got strong. My lungs adapted. I fell in love with the physical rhythm of it — the challenge of the bike ride as its own workout, the surf as the reward, the long shower afterward and the smoothie bowl I’d make because I’d actually earned it.
I wasn’t fully settled — the relationship was uncertain, the future was uncertain — but the days were good. Sometimes uncertain futures make for the best present moments because you stop trying to plan and just live the day in front of you.
Year Three: The Healing Season
This one is harder to write about and more important because of it.
By the time I came back for year three, the relationship that had been uncertain for a long time had finally, lovingly, ended. We’d done Argentina and Chile together and I think we both knew on that trip that we were playing a game of two people with big dreams who couldn’t make the other one follow theirs without sacrificing something essential. It ended with a lot of love and not much anger and more grief than I expected even though I knew it was right.
I came to Mexico heartbroken and also facing a fear I’d been carrying my whole adult life: being alone. Really alone. No person to come home to, no relationship to tend to, a foreign country where nobody knew me or needed anything from me.
And what I found — again, the same thing I’d found in smaller doses in the years before — was that I was fine.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t miss him. It means that when I got quiet enough to actually hear myself, what I heard wasn’t panic. It was something closer to relief, and then something closer to curiosity about who I was without performing for anyone.
That season I got deep into meditation. My surf instructor from year one had introduced me to Joe Dispenza — a neuroscientist who combines brain science with meditation practice in a way that actually made sense to my analytical brain. My brother had introduced me to the Wim Hof breathing method. I combined them. I started doing morning breathwork before surfing. I started sitting with my thoughts instead of running from them with plans and activity and the noise of other people.
Here’s what I learned about myself that season that I carry everywhere now: I had been resentful for years — at weddings, at baby showers, at people who seemed to have figured out the conventional path — and I’d told myself it was because their lives were boring. The real reason was simpler and harder. I felt like a misfit in a world where everyone around me knew what they were supposed to want, and I didn’t, and I was embarrassed about that.
Sitting with that honestly, without judgment, without immediately trying to fix it or argue myself out of it — that was the work. And Mexico gave me the space to do it.
Year Four: Protecting What I Built
This year was different from the moment I landed.
People texted before I arrived. Friends were already here. My surf friends knew I was coming. The woman at the fruit stand recognized me. Four years in, Sayulita knows me — and I know it in the way you only know a place you’ve returned to repeatedly, not the way a tourist knows it after a week.
This should feel like pure belonging and it mostly does. But it also changed something about the escape of it.
Year one I arrived knowing nobody and the anonymity was medicine. I was nobody here and that was a relief after years of being somebody somewhere, performing, maintaining, giving my energy away. Now I’m somebody here too — just a different somebody, a better-fitting one — and I had to actively protect the hermit mornings instead of them existing naturally. I had to tell people I wasn’t available. I had to resist the people-pleasing instinct that lives in me.
That’s growth, I think. Learning that belonging somewhere doesn’t mean you owe it everything.
What a Normal Day Actually Looks Like
6:00 or 6:15. Coffee. An hour of stillness before the sun rises at 7:30 — I don’t rush this and I don’t apologize for it. After six months of bartending until 10pm the quiet morning is not laziness. It’s survival.
Bike to the surf break. Two hours in the water, sometimes three. Surfing for two hours sounds recreational until you’ve done it — you’re paddling constantly, fighting currents, getting worked by waves you misjudged, using muscles you forgot existed. I come out genuinely tired.
Bike back. Make something real for lunch. A smoothie bowl, eggs with vegetables, whatever’s at the market. I have time to cut up a cucumber here. To make turmeric lemon water. To actually cook. During the season in Jersey I’m packing Uncrustables at 7am because I have to be behind a bar in forty minutes. The pace of eating here is as different as everything else.
The afternoon belongs to whatever I actually want to do. The blog. A mosaic made from beach stones. Hemp jewelry. This year I got into vibe coding — building things with AI tools, learning what’s possible, not knowing yet what I’ll do with it. These three months are specifically for exploring what I have no time to touch during the season. Some ideas go somewhere. Some don’t. All of them are better than not trying.
Some days I go to the gym, which costs $4, which remains one of my favorite facts about this place. Some days I do a yoga class at the hot studio nearby. Some days I hike to San Pancho on a Tuesday when there’s a market — you walk through jungle, arrive at a market, eat and try new delicious snacks from different stands, rest, walk back.
I eat fruit I don’t recognize and buy it anyway. Jicama — crisp and cool, perfect for dipping. Maracuyá, which is passion fruit, is extraordinary. This year I stumbled on guayaba, a yellow fruit eaten as is with a thin skin and a sweet-tart taste that is somehow addictive. I also buy jamaica leaves and make my own juice — known as jamaica in Mexico but more commonly recognized elsewhere as hibiscus. It makes a beautiful red drink that you can sweeten as much or as little as you like. There are fruit stands everywhere and I try everything new I find.
I don’t get bored. That used to surprise me and now it doesn’t. When your default state is overstimulated and exhausted, a slow afternoon with a book and a breeze isn’t empty. It’s the whole point.
When the Surf is Bad
Bad surf — small weak waves, choppy onshore conditions — is still a good day. I’ll paddle out anyway sometimes, just to float and be in the ocean. Other times I read the forecast and plan something else. What a bad surf day doesn’t create is restlessness. That’s new. That’s something Mexico taught me over four years. Even when I can’t surf, I can take a blanket to the beach and read a book — something I never have time for during the work season — or sit and write, letting myself think back on the travels and experiences that this blog is built around. Bad surf doesn’t equal a bad day. Some days my body is happy for the break.
When a Friend Visits
Everything changes and I mean that in the best and most honest way.
I know where to go now. Which break is good for beginners, which hike has the payoff view, where to get a massage that won’t disappoint. I know the market vendors, the best fruit stands, the bakeries worth making a detour for. Four years in and this place has stopped being somewhere I’m figuring out and started being somewhere I actually know.
I love showing people this place. When a friend visits we do the market hike, eat from the stands, rent boards, stay up later than I normally would. I try to be genuinely present for it — I’ve learned clearly about myself here that I don’t need a lot of social stimulation during these months, and my mornings are sacred enough that giving them up temporarily requires a little internal negotiation. But the visits are always worth it. The decompression afterward is always real too.
Friends also remind me to actually enjoy this place in ways I forget to on my own. When you’re living here on a budget you don’t treat yourself to everything available. But when someone comes to visit, suddenly I’ll try the restaurants I’ve been walking past for weeks, take the boat tour out to Marietas Island to snorkel, go on a whale watching excursion, talk my friend into a surf lesson so I still get in the water. Friends pull me out of routine in the best way. Go to the beach at night and look at the stars. Stop and actually watch the street performers. Get a massage as a treat rather than a necessity. Order dessert because there are plenty of bakeries and cakes here worth trying and life is short.
I also get to play tourist, which I genuinely love. It is a different way of seeing somewhere you think you already know. And it is always a good reminder that this place — which has become routine to me in the best sense — is extraordinary to someone seeing it for the first time. That is worth remembering.
The Honest Part
I went home between seasons last year and one afternoon I was walking my parents’ dog in the suburb I grew up in, and I had a moment. Everyone around me was my age or younger, with kids, with houses, with the markers of a conventional life going according to plan. And for a minute I felt like a loser. A grown adult at her parents’ house, walking their dog, no house, no husband, no clear destination.
I want to put that in writing because I think it’s important.
My life is wild and adventurous and I’m genuinely thriving and I know people would trade for it. I also sometimes stand on a sidewalk in a suburb feeling like a misfit. Both things are true simultaneously and neither one cancels the other out. What the meditation taught me — what sitting with myself for three months at a time in a foreign country taught me — is that you’re allowed to feel the feeling and then let it go. You don’t have to argue yourself out of it. You don’t have to fix it. You just feel it, acknowledge it, and keep walking the dog.
I went back inside. I kept going.
The Health Reset Nobody Talks About
I get extremely healthy here. Physically, obviously — surfing and biking every day, eating fruit and vegetables and fish, sleeping when I’m tired. But the mental health piece is just as significant and I don’t think I gave it enough credit in earlier versions of this article.
I come back to New Jersey in the spring and people notice something different. Not just that I’m tan. Something steadier. The meditation, the breathwork, the mornings of actual stillness — they compound across three months into a version of myself that’s more grounded than the one who left in October. That version of me is a better bartender, a better friend, a better writer, a better thinker about what I’m building.
The reset is the whole point. I didn’t fully understand that year one. I understand it completely now.
How Long Will I Keep Doing This
I don’t know.
Four years of coming back means something. The community I’ve built here, the surf practice, the creative rhythm, the version of myself that only exists when I’m not performing for anyone — those mean something too.
But I’ve also learned not to make promises about places. Vail was magic and then it ran its course. Sayulita is changing — more developed, more expensive, more known every year. I’m changing too. What I needed year one is not what I need year four and what I need year four might not be what I need year seven if there is one.
Maybe next winter is Costa Rica. Maybe it’s the same apartment with the same breeze and the same fruit stand. Maybe I figure out the business idea that’s been living in the back of my head through four years of surfing and mosaics and early morning coffee and vibe coding experiments.
What I know is that these three months — wherever they happen — are not optional for me anymore. The reset is built into the operating system now. Without it I don’t function as well and I know that because I’ve spent enough time being still and honest with myself to actually know who I am and what I need.
That’s the real thing Mexico gave me. Not the tan. Not the surf skill. Not even the tacos, though the tacos are genuinely excellent.
The knowing.