The vacation had been flawless. One week in December, a condo near the beach, restaurants every night, kids in the pool until dark.
So when they decided to relocate — two careers gone remote, three kids under twelve — the decision felt obvious. They bought a home fifteen minutes from where they’d vacationed.
The first month felt like a victory lap. The second month, school started.
The campus they’d chosen — the one that fit their kids best — sat nearly an hour south. Twice a day. Ten times a week. They did the math on a napkin at a soda one morning: over four hundred hours a year, in the car, on coastal roads.
They had bought a home in the right country and the wrong place.
It wasn’t just the school. Their kids’ new friends lived near the school, which meant birthday parties, sleepovers, and football practice all lived an hour away too. The town that had been electric on vacation was loud on a Tuesday night. The things that make a great holiday — energy, bars, crowds — are rarely the things that make a great school week.
They lasted fourteen months. Then they sold — well, eventually; the sale took most of a high season — and bought again, this time ten minutes from the school gate, in a quiet gated community where half the school’s families seemed to live.
The second move cost them a commission, closing costs twice, a rental overlap, and the particular exhaustion of moving children who had just unpacked.
Their advice to friends now is unsentimental: pick the school, then pick the house. In that order.
The town that hosts a perfect vacation is rarely the town that hosts a perfect Tuesday.
The Story Timeline
The Cost
Lessons For Future Buyers
Insider Perspective
Families consistently underweight the school in the decision and overweight the beach. On this coast the school options are genuinely good, but they're concentrated — and the families who thrive almost always live within fifteen minutes of the gate.
Where They Are Now
They're happy now — genuinely. But they paid twice for a lesson the right rental would have taught them for almost nothing.
Considering Playas del Coco? You can read the unfiltered local take on this area, or talk it through with us before you fall in love with anything.
