La Ventana is not what I expected or what I’d hoped for—because to hope for something like this would mean that I would have had some frame of reference for such a place. But there is no place like this that I’ve ever been to.

This is a place where the gringos—the Canadians and the Americanos from the West—drive down in their old Tacomas and their vans and their F350s with their RVs and stay. They come at the end of November when it starts to get cold where they are and they stay here until it is warm again, kitesurfing and letting the kids run feral, drinking Pacificos with their amigos, and talking about the old times, or the wind and the water and whether it will blow tomorrow as strong or as gusty as today.

This is not a vacation spot, it is a lifestyle spot.

At Baja Joe’s last night, one of the few bars on this stretch of road with anything approaching a crowd, a man fit and pushing 60 claimed to know the original Joe, who started the place. “He came down here thirty years ago. He brought kitesurfing to La Ventana.” Except that kitesurfing is too new a sport to have been around back then. But still. The old times.