n 2005, we took our first trip to Playa del Carmen. It wasn’t so much a choice to specifically go to PDC. We just happened to live close to the Galveston cruise terminal, and the ship happened to be going to PDC, and it happened to be in our budget. It was a bonus that it was a short trip, because it was the first time we would leave the kids with grandparents for a vacation. That was the extent of the foresight and planning that went into this trip. We learned two very important lessons from that trip. 1. We hate cruises. Vehemently. 2. We love PDC. We had no idea that this trip, with so little planning, would change the course of our lives and shape our financial decisions for decades to come. None of that came until much later.
We had no real plan once we docked in PDC. Our cab driver dropped us off at the bus terminal near Fifth Avenue. All those years ago, Fifth Avenue extended only a few blocks and was mostly local shops and market style vendors. By 10 am, our feet were badly burned from our lack of planning and no sunscreen, and we had walked the entire length of Fifth Avenue.
We ate lunch just off of Fifth Avenue then ended up at a boutique beach hotel with good music, lounge chairs in the sand, and a waitress that served us the best berry mojitos I have ever had. We spent the rest of the day in that very spot wishing we could just stay there and dreading getting back on the ship. We probably had our next trip planned out before we even returned home, but I don’t remember the specifics. I just know that it was the first of many trips to Playa del Carmen over the years.
Over the next decade, we traveled to PDC multiple times. Sometimes we would go three or four times per year. We stayed at boutique hotels and various resorts. The kids celebrated birthdays in Playa, we celebrated anniversaries in Playa, went there to relax and recoup, we explored, and fell a little more in love with the sleepy beach town that was growing exponentially. It would be a few years later when we saw a real estate sign advertising a home for sale for $90,000 that we started to dream about living in Playa. It was such an abstract idea, though, even at $90,000. It was as real as planning on winning the lottery. But over the years as we dreamed about it, a shift happened. We no longer thought about it as an abstract idea. Our dreams started to formulate into plans, and almost ten years after that first trip we purchased our first vacation home, a two bedroom condo in Playa.
Now, almost three years later, we are selling our condo, and beginning the process of building the home, starting a new business, and moving to Playa to be full-time Beach Monkeys!
