Ellen: How We Found San Pancho

San Pancho's beach

After a year of sailing our boat across the Pacific, husband Marsh and I had had enough. The live-aboard life was not for us. But what to do next? We’d sold our house in New England and put our stuff in storage. Best to hit the road and hunt for a hometown, we figured, somewhere away from ice and snow. We came up with a travel plan. We would drive up and down the U.S. and Mexican coastlines in our pickup, stopping in towns we heard were interesting or that caught our eye. It would be an open ended trip; we would stop when it no longer felt like fun. About four to six months would do it, we thought.

We came up with a rating system for the towns we’d visit. We listed all the must-have’s and weighted the factors, assigning them points. A university rated high (intellectual stimulation). So did a house price we could afford and a teaching job opportunity for me. We’d add up the points and give the top scorer a trial run.

First to be rated was Wilmington, North Carolina, last was Seattle, Washington. In the six months between them, we looked at 24 places, including eight in Mexico. Each was vetted in the same way: we visited a Realtor, explained the rating system, and asked to see what the town had to offer. A good Realtor is also a good tour guide---after a day or two, we usually could do the math and move on.

At the end of six months, tired of traveling, we had three top contenders, all in the U.S.: Savannah, Georgia; Beaufort, South Carolina; and San Luis Obispo, California. We made our decision. We decided to ignore the scores and the winners. Instead we picked a tiny town in Mexico that hadn’t even made it into the Top Ten.

Bucerias, Nayarit, then population 6,000, got the nod. On the Bay of Banderas and ten miles north of Puerto Vallarta, its cobble stoned streets and brilliant rosa Mexicano bougainvilleas spilling over garden walls hit a nerve in both of us. We hadn’t even thought to rate raw natural beauty during our search for a new hometown. Now it turned out to be the determining factor. Never mind that most of the small shops could have used a coat of paint, that leaking pipes poured water down every other street, and that dogs left a trail from the garbage bags they tore into . The long white sand beach and the sound of the gentle surf made us overlook all that. We called the scruffiness “local color.”

Within weeks of arrival, we bought a lot and broke ground on a new house. We named it “Quinta Elena,” after the lady of the house, and its bedrooms were filled from November to May with family and friends. The climate and colors, the people and palms: Everything that resonated with us dazzled them, too.

As we explored the area, we found smaller towns we liked even better. So when a three-story condo building went in next door, and new neighbors peered down from their porches at us in our pool, we used them as an excuse to buy more land, sell the house, and build again. This time we found a spectacular hilltop in sweet little San Pancho, half an hour up the coast. A year later, I sat on the porch of Quinta Elena II, savoring the new view of the Pacific and thanking my lucky stars for leading me to this place on the planet.