Cabo San Lucas Prepping for Travel
A fantastic vacation is always finding the perfect balance between advance research and the inspiration of the moment. Breaks down into three main categories; right flight for the right price, where you will stay and what you want to do.
Every year we take my Mom on a vacation for her birthday. She has been and is an awesome Mom, Mama (Grandma) and just an all-around great person to be around. This year was no exception. My husband and I kept going back and forth on where to go, but we settled on Cabo San Lucas. From Seattle, it’s about a four-hour direct flight. With a three year old, that’s juust about long enough (if you’re lucky) for a good nap or (more likely) video and some new flight toys.
So many of my friends are afraid to travel with their kids. Before my son was a year old, he was already an international traveler. Travelling with kids takes a little bit of planning and a spot of courage (and getting comfortable with the realization you won’t see the people on the plane again), but it’s not difficult. One of these nights, I’ll put a post together about travelling with a baby/toddler, but right now, I’ll get on with our trip to Mexico.
For your flight
Look early and be ready to pull the trigger when you find the right price. My Mom’s birthday is in August, we wanted to go the end of October/November so we bought our tickets at the end of June – which seems crazy early to buy tickets, but we were able to get round trip tickets for under $300. The same flight a month before we left, was $647. If you use a site like Kayak, they will tell you if you should buy or wait to buy tickets. We ended up with one way direct tickets, but had I pulled the trigger the week before we would have had direct tickets both ways for the same price, Ah well.
Where to Stay
Number one priority for our family was there be at least two bedrooms – one for us and another for my Mom. My son takes a nap at 1:30pm, which in a hotel ends up as dead time. Someone always has to either take a nap at the same time or we all have be quiet until he gets up. Not really fun. It made more sense for us to rent a house. After looking at two-bedroom hotels or condos, we ended up going with a Home Away house rental with three bedrooms, a private pool and a hot tub. Let me just say, it was worth every penny. It was even more beautiful than it looks in the pictures. While my son took his nap, we were swimming or relaxing outside in the gorgeous weather. It was so wonderful, we spent one day just at ‘home’ only going in to Cabo for dinner. The location was 15 minutes either side of Cabo San Lucas or Los Cabos, but for the family retreat we wanted, it was perfect. We rented a car at the airport because unless you’re confident on a bus – a car makes more sense. (side note: if you end up renting from National and don’t want to pay the extra insurance rate, you actually need to bring a copy of your insurance policy. No, not the card, the actual policy. Yeah, we found that out too late so we had to fork over the extra daily insurance fee *grumble*).
What to do, what to do?
There are so many things to do in the area. We picked three major things we wanted to do before we went on vacation. We decided on a turtle release in Los Cabos, dolphin adventure in Cabo San Lucas and the glass bottom boat, because I remembered that from when we were in Cabo 25 years ago.
There were a bunch of other things I found to do, but we were on a relaxation track so that was enough for us. I’m a big vacation researcher, so here’s the list I put together before we left:
- Dolphin Encounter
- Baby Sea Turtle Release
- Glass Bottom Boat
- Chileno Bay (Great with kids)
- Camel Ride
- Flyboard (this is so on my list when my son gets older)
- San Jose del Cabo Art Walk
- Oceanfront Massage
- Parasailing
- Glass Bottom Boat
- Saturday Farmers Market
- Todos Santos 30 minutes away (Hotel California, Jesuit Mission, Artist Community)
- Los Cabos Surfing Beaches
