A sixtieth birthday celebration presented my wife and me with a case for joining friends for a week together in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where we would be able to pose recumbent on chaises longues by a swimming pool, cloak ourselves in the sounds of rustling palm trees and the imperishable surf, and welcome volumes of chilled beverages delivered throughout each day to our pampered hands. Despite the deteriorating conditions at airports across the United States,¹ we packed our luggage last week and took off for birthday cake and good company at Garza Blanca Los Cabos in Baja California Sur.
Before checking in at the hotel, I took a stroll around the lobby to admire the view outside beyond the eight swimming pools to the Sea of Cortés. A family of four eating popsicles exited through the front door. A woman carrying a small dog walked past, the dog wearing what appeared to be a diaper, the woman, opals. Staff in pressed white tunics made their way briskly from place to place, saluting guests with a hand to the heart as they passed. A lone man sitting in the cocktail lounge adjacent to the entrance and nursing a beer hummed Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten to himself. The light of the afternoon sun filled the space, its golden fixtures outdone by the illumination from the star in the sky.
We ate dinner the first night at NOI, the rooftop Italian restaurant at the resort. No one could account for the advent of the restaurant name, so I decided it was the initialism for Not Otherwise Identified, which, if a correct guess, wins a nod of appreciation from me for the pawky consultant who sold the idea. The food and conversation were outstanding,
let alone the surroundings, which included an unobstructed view of the sea. Sometimes called the world’s aquarium,
the Sea of Cortés is home to nearly one thousand species of fish and over thirty types of marine mammals, including the
largest animal on Earth, the blue whale. Roosterfish and mackerel lurked within the nighttime water offshore.
The resort was home to four restaurants covering a variety of cuisines, as well as poolside service making it entirely unnecessary to rise in search of lunch. On our first full day in Mexico, we did not leave the hotel and ate dinner at Hiroshi, one of the restaurants on site. With one or two exceptions, for the balance of our stay, once the sun had come up, we could be found on the resort property at the pool, on the beach, at the spa or the salon, or in one of the restaurants, comprehensively pampered, the men manicured and pedicured, our cares in abeyance at the insistence of mystical figures appearing to each of us from within an oneiric state.
We all had learned of The Sand Bar, a local landmark where one could pay for as much as a ninety‐minute massage on a patio at the edge of the bay in Cabo San Lucas, squired by a legend that the sound of the surf, the warm breeze, and the kneading of muscles combined to make a catnap irresistible. Naturally, being the hedonists we are, we each booked a ninety‐minute massage and, on our second day, piled into a taxi. In my case, the legend proved to be true. One strips down to underwear, drapes a towel over the shoulders, and is escorted to one of thirty tables overlooking the beach, where, for an hour and a half, a rapturous encounter with a complete stranger unfolds. Focus quickly shifts from the strength in the fingers by which the muscles are being probed and squeezed to the residual heat and utter relaxation that remain after those fingers have moved on. A trance follows, led by the beating of the Pacific Ocean upon the sand. Instructions to turn the head or shift the hips delivered sotto voce are easily mistaken for the pleadings of a lover. One emerges feeling infused with renewed vitality.
We fêted the birthday for which we had all converged over dinner Thursday at
Acre Resort & Restaurant in San José del Cabo.
Among its many elegant features, the resort offers accommodation in self‐contained treehouses hoist into the palms upon sturdy platforms, and our walk on the grounds to the restaurant within presented us with views of two or three of them. They were pretty cool. The contrast between the polished improvements of the resort and the chaos on
the Tourist Corridor through which we had driven to reach the resort concentrated the moment of theater upon stepping from the car to be greeted by uniformed staff. A massive construction project on the Corridor highway had converted the road into a boulevard of bare earth, unregulated by other than the consent of surrounding drivers to imagine themselves
elsewhere than upon a surface reminiscent of a commercial for Jeep automobiles depicting them off‐road in the thrall of lawless wilderness. In this bumper‐to‐bumper jam of taxis, rental cars, tractor+trailer combinations, and locals going to the grocery store, intersections were uncontrolled. The only evidence of an official provision for
safety was a lone woman at one such intersection who was standing sensibly atop a very large mound of dirt well out of the way of traffic, not in the center of the intersection but off to one side of the road and at the periphery of vision, dressed in a pale orange shirt, holding a small and faded flag downward against her leg. Thus, with an occasional
and nonchalant stirring motion of her flag, were the passing drivers alerted to the hazards to be found in all directions. At the resort, our dinner was excellent, and we enjoyed singing
Happy Birthday
along with the staff at its conclusion.
We made a promenade after dinner around the
San José del Cabo Art Walk,
enjoying the warm evening and the arts and crafts on display. The sidewalks and shops were filled with people similarly engaged. I took advantage of our time in the Gallery District to admire
Misión Estero de las Palmas de San José del Cabo Añuití,
which had been founded in 1730 by Jesuits Nicolás Tamaral and José Echeverría and was the southernmost of the Jesuit missions on the Baja California peninsula.² In 1734 the Indigenous Pericú people rose in revolt against the Spanish missionaries; Tamaral was killed, and the mission was destroyed, only to be reestablished in 1735, rebuilt after being damaged by floods in 1793, and abandoned in 1840 in disrepair. The current building dates to 1940, having again been rebuilt, preserving
the original walls and structure, after a 1918 hurricane. 
Above the entrance, the façade bears a tile mural that
depicts the martyrdom of Father Tamaral. (I recognize that the church was founded by disciples of a man who was executed and that it makes graphic use of that execution in its collateral material, so homicide is a theme, but I do wonder if the mural here depicting the lynching of Nicolás Tamara is a bit macabre for some worshipers,
particularly given its prominence directly over the front door.) The Pericú people who were the objects of the proselytization of the Jesuits, and the Franciscans (1768–1773) and Dominicans (1773–1840) after them, have been linguistically and culturally extinct since the late eighteenth century, overtaken by combat deaths and Old World
diseases.
When the writer John Steinbeck sailed into Cabo San Lucas aboard the Western Flyer in 1940, he saw nary a light at night from the town of about three hundred souls.³ I would like to have seen it then. Eighty years later, the census takers counted 202,694 people living in Cabo San Lucas. Presumably their majority had not spent the week in quite the same way as we: outdoors in garbed imitation of The Venus of Urbino, finding it very agreeable to count ourselves among the bourgeoisie if not the haut monde, encircled by walls that reduced the cacophony of all the world to the sounds of people at play, but the hundreds of resort employees who made their homes on the peninsula and patrolled the grounds looking for opportunities to render their guests a service, whilst others of them prepared meals or tucked chocolates beneath pillows, represented their home town with ready smiles and gentle manner, reminders to hope that they, too, found ease where once was a fishing village that had not yet attracted the notice of the entirety of both hemispheres. We rolled our luggage toward the taxi upon leave‐taking full of contentment and mirth, in the fashion of children skipping home at the end of a birthday party.
Update November 5, 2025
We remain fuddled by how we left and returned to the United States with nary a complaint in the midst of the shutdown of the federal government and its corresponding grave effects on air travel. Now a few days after our return, the Federal Aviation Administration has announced a 10% air traffic reduction to commence on November 7
that will affect those traveling through Seattle/Tacoma International (SEA), which would have presumably captured us had we not already come home. We surely have been living charmed lives. See i.a.
Josh Funk,
Matthew Daly,
Rio Yamat,
FAA reducing air traffic by 10% across 40 ‘high-volume’ markets during government shutdown,
The Seattle Times,
November 5, 2025, https://www.seattletimes.com/business/faa-reducing-air-traffic-by-10-across-40-high-volume-markets/.