OUR LOVE FOR PUERTO VALLARTA & BANDERAS BAY
My husband and I are a couple in our late 40’s, early 50’s with two sweet daughters ages 21 and 23. We’re a family from northern California who travels regularly to Puerto Vallarta at various points throughout the year, spending several weeks there at a time. Our early travels to Mexico were initially focused on Playa del Carmen, until our very first trip to Puerto Vallarta and Banderas Bay in 1991. Oh my goodness. On that very first PV holiday we were hooked! We were completely spellbound by the friendly locals, the gorgeous weather, the wide range of fun activities available, and just the sheer natural beauty of the entire bay. At the time we were young and just had our first child, but on our very first trip to the area while riding bicycles through Nuevo Vallarta my husband vowed to me that someday in the future we would purchase a little condo in this beautiful paradise so we could vacation with our family and friends and later spend our retirement years in this incredible destination.
As our daughters grew up they would look forward to spending vacations on the beautiful beaches of Mexico, with many of our trips focused on spending time along the beaches of Banderas Bay. We frequented the all-inclusive resorts in Nuevo Vallarta because they offered our family the peace and tranquility of a fun beach vacation at properties with sprawling gardens, giant swimming pools, and a variety of fun family activities and entertainment. And when the girls were small they did not eat three standard meals a day but rather grazed on several really tiny meals as the day progressed. So having a variety of good-quality food available around the clock without having to leave the resort was a very important vacation amenity for our family. And even though we were staying at all-inclusive resorts, during each trip several days were dedicated to taking the bus or a rental car into Puerto Vallarta to enjoy fabulous afternoons and/or evenings just walking around the city and exploring, and going on a variety of fun family adventures.
By the time our eldest daughter Ashley was in high school, we were finally able to purchase a little condo, pre-construction, in lovely Nuevo Vallarta. Now that we have our tiny slice of paradise we are able to visit the area more often, coming several times each year anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks at a time. When we first started spending a lot of time in Puerto Vallarta, we were always trying to locate interesting and helpful travel information about the entire Banderas Bay area. Although there are plenty of good websites, magazines and tourism brochures each offering many wonderful pieces of information, we had hoped to locate one comprehensive website that would fully encompass a great deal of the tourist information we ourselves were looking for all in once place. As my two engineers in the family always say, if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for then create it! So this site is born out of the love and passion we have for our favorite place on earth.
Puerto Vallarta is a very dynamic place, always changing and evolving and becoming even more wonderful over time. As a family we don’t claim to know everything about this precious location as that would be absolutely impossible, and in fact we ourselves are just scratching the surface. But as we travel around the area and continue to learn more and more our bank of knowledge continues to broaden. Through this site we are committed to sharing with you what we learn during our many trips to the area, including helpful information we’ve discovered when interacting with locals, our international neighbors, and through online ambassadors from various local forums where I post under the name BeachOceanSun. If you happen to see an area of this site that could be further expanded to be more helpful to tourists, or if you notice an update or correction that needs to be made, please let us know! As time goes on and we research new topics and discover new things we’ll share that information with you here on visit-vallarta.com. So this site will never truly be completed. It will continue to change and expand. Right now my husband is creating a series of great interactive maps to assist travelers with getting to know the area and its many amenities, and upon completion each will be posted in the Map section of this site.
When deciding on a fun and memorable mascot for this new Puerto Vallarta site, we decided that the most appropriate mascot would be our own family’s long-time friend, a unique and beachy character created by my husband in his teenage years: Gilbert The Beach Bum. Sometime in the near future we may offer a limited selection of whimsical yet useful Gilbert merchandise like luggage tags, T-shirts and canvas totes that can be special ordered. And this year we’ll be giving away a few visit-vallarta T-shirts on Instagram! We hope you’ll enjoy this site and will find many great gems of information within its pages. If you have a suggestion on a travel topic that we can include on this site, or if there is a tour operation that you would like to have added, please feel free to contact me at: beachoceansun@yahoo.com. Many good wishes are sent your way for happy travels to beautiful and sunny Puerto Vallarta, Mexico!
Mapping out Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, one street at a time! We interviewed dozens of locals, walked the streets with our clipboard and notebooks, wore out several pairs of shoes in the process, took hundreds of photos to capture the details, checked out public bathroom facilities to see if they were kept clean, and went on lots of tours. We hope you’ll enjoy the product of our efforts and that you’ll find these maps and the information contained on this site to be helpful to you on your upcoming vacation!
THIS WEBSITE IS DEDICATED TO: The enchanting city of Puerto Vallarta and it’s beautiful, gracious residents who forever stand in greeting with their hearts and arms wide open, welcoming visitors from all over the world to their sun-kissed shores.