TAG ARCHIVES: LAS CASITAS IN ZIPOLITE

Zipolite. The First Few Days.

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Zipolite. The First Few Days…..
We arrived in Mexico on December 
14. I can hardly believe that we are 
here until the end of March. Over the 
past 20 years we have vacationed in 
Mexico for 2 to 3 weeks almost 
every winter. Each time we have 
been here I have felt it is the place 
I want to be forever. That is a 
remarkable realization. There are 
some things that it is very good 
to figure out: what you want to do 
to earn a living, who you want to 
spend your life with, and where you want to 
live on this planet. I don’t know 
how we’ll figure it out but I know that Mexico is where I want to spend 
most of my time. Happily, Fred loves it, too.
This trip we are in Zipolite, a small beach town on the Pacific coast in 

Oaxaca state. It is big enough that there are several restaurants and 
bars, and small enough to have no traffic on the main street. There are 
not many Americans who come here. Most of the tourists are Canadian 
and European, as well as many Mexicans on vacation.
We are staying at Las Casitas, a wonderful collection of palapa-roofed

 little houses on the hillside, looking down at the ocean. I lack words to 
describe how beautiful it is. The proprietors, Paco and Javier, are guys 
we met when we visited this part of Mexico before. They have my favorite 
restaurant in Mexico, La Providencia, right here in Zipolite. I was thrilled 
to learn (when I was looking for a place to rent in Zipolite) that they had 
added Las Casitas to their enterprise, providing not only a stylish restaurant,
 but also a lovely place to stay, and I have not been disappointed. We 
decided to extend our trip and come earlier then we had originally booked, 
so we have spent the first 10 days in the biggest house on the property, 
where they live during the slow season. We move today to a smaller one, 
and I’m sure we’ll love it, too. Staying in this wonderful house has been 
like my fantasy of the perfect Mexican house. It is so comfortable and 
filled with atmosphere. Paco is the chef at La Providencia, so the shelves 
are filled with cookbooks. Javier is an artist, and many of his wonderful 
portraits are in this house. Everything is open-air, so the inside and the 
outside become one. If you are a close friend of ours in Nashville, you 
have spent a summer evening with us on our back porch, so you know 
how well that suits us.
So far, we have been eating two meals a day at home and going out for 

one. I enjoy cooking here, and will be writing more about that in future 
posts.
I am going to close for now–more to come……hasta mañana.