When I was a kid, my grandfather owned a house on the beach in Ensenada, Mexico. We occasionally drove down to hang out there. En route, we always stopped at a cheap and extremely casual lobster restaurant at the top of a cliff in Rosarito, just south of Tijuana. Once at the beach house, we spent our days and evenings doing a lot of nothing, but on the beach. My dad and grandfather would hunt quail and surf-fish, so our food was typically wild and local. Back in those days, there was hardly anyone on the beach, so we had this big wide California beach mostly to ourselves. Nearby, we could rent a horse for a $1.50 for the day, which we could ride on the beach and even in the shallow surf. We bought fireworks in Tijuana en route — explosives that would and should have been illegal in the US, and so we spent our unsupervised nights on the beach blowing shit up.

These precious Mexican days were languid and sunburned and sandy and delicious.

These memories triggered special joy at our recent time in El Salvador in late December.

Amira was born in El Salvador; still has family there. So Amira and her family, her brother and his family, plus a smattering of cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews all got a huge beach house for a week on the beach in El Salvador’s Costa Del Sol.

It reminded me so much of my childhood trips to Mexico. The house in El Salvador was much nicer, and the food much better, but the general feeling of doing nothing on a mostly deserted beach all day, living on local seafood and exploding ordinance at night was very similar.

This time, I’m the grandfather. And it was a joy to see my granddaughter playing in the surf and enjoying the freedom and fun of beach-house holidays.

Amira’s Aunt Reina loves to cook, and she’s super good at it, and prepared massive pots of food for us over a wood fire — locally provisioned crab, lobster, fish, hand-made tortillas and pupusas and other goodies. Outside the Big City, foods like this are purchased directly from the producers or fishermen. They catch it and sell it. We buy it and cook it. The directness of this supply chain makes it all taste better somehow.