With its dramatic peaks flanking the blue-green waters of the Sea of Cortez, San Carlos draws hordes of vacationers annually from Arizona, California and points further afield.

Sailors wax rhapsodic about heading out of San Carlos to explore the region’s unspoiled landscapes, its countless harbors and quiet anchorages. The cruising there sounds superb, and we’re debating whether to ship our soon-to-be new boat to Seattle as soon as possible or leave it in Mexico a little longer for a late fall cruise.

San Carlos is also popular among divers, fishermen and general snowbirds. It caters to vacationers, which seems to be both a boon and a drawback.

The pros: clean accommodations, friendly people, bath-warm water during the summer, decent snorkeling and diving, restaurants where it’s possible to have a salad and not spend the next three days in the bathroom.

The cons: overpriced but rundown accommodations, an uninspired main strip, pricey moorage, a paucity of good beaches and restaurants that rival U.S. prices but not quality (though a sign on one establishment did promise ”fine dinning”).

Sailing is among the many outdoor activities enjoyed by visitors to San Carlos.

Qualifiers are useful in San Carlos. An ex-pat living there might tell you a particular hotel in the Mexican resort town “is inexpensive … for San Carlos” or that a restaurant “has decent Italian food … for San Carlos.” In other words, don’t set your expectations too high or you’ll be disappointed.

And be prepared to pay. The moorage on the boat we’re buying is $510 a month at the San Carlos Marina, about $60 more than we were paying for our previous boat in downtown Seattle.

We first stayed at the Marina Terra Hotel in a room priced at $110 and negotiated down to $84 (August was the off-season, after all) that wasn’t a great deal even at the bargain price. It was rundown, dingy and had the hardest bed we’d ever slept on, consisting of a thin mattress sitting on top of stucco-covered frame built into the wall. But hey, at least the air conditioner worked.

A room at the Marina Terra Hotel, adjacent to the Marina San Carlos (oddly, there was a hot plate, but no fridge).

The second room was a better deal at $50, even with (or because of, depending on one’s perspective) the 1960s-style orange flowered bedspreads, pink plastic chairs and stained glass swag hanging precariously over one bed. With its brightly painted concrete block walls separating each unit, grouped around a swimming pool filled daily with vacationing Mexican kids and their parents, the Motel Creston had a pleasantly kitschy, homey feel.

There were chains on the doors and the television converter was tethered to the nightstand, which let us know they cared about security. I was relieved to see just one cockroach in the room, and the air conditioner blessedly transformed the space into a walk-in freezer, providing some necessary respite from the cursed heat.

Motel Creston: $50 rooms and air conditioning cold enough for a meat locker.

About that heat: we were expecting San Carlos to be hot and realized the particular foolishness of going there during one of the most spectacular Seattle summers in recent history.

But we found what sounded like the perfect boat for us and didn’t want to risk someone else getting to it before we did (in the midst of a recession, it’s of course perfectly reasonable to worry about a run on offshore sailboats; I think I’ve mentioned the level of boat-hunting obsessiveness that’s seized the Three Sheets household recently).

Even though we anticipated it, the heat was shocking. I’m the first to acknowledge that Seattleites are weather pussies. A few inches of snow all but shuts the city down and temperatures anywhere upward of 80 cause people to wither. But I’ve lived in hot, humid places before—Toronto, Baltimore, New York—and I was taken aback by the heat in San Carlos. 

Boulevard Beltrones, San Carlos' uninspired main drag.

The temperature was around 95 to 100 degrees every day with humidity of about 85 percent, creating a stultifying heat index of about 115-118 degrees. We took to driving our rental car anywhere further than about a block, a level of laziness I’d normally be appalled by.

“You know it’s hot when even the Mexicans are sweating,” Marty remarked, observing a local man standing in the shade of a tree, his beige t-shirt drenched.

I realize that our perceptions of San Carlos were at least partially colored by the miserable heat and the fact that the town was suffering a double hit of off-season slowness and a drop in business related to the recession and fears about the swine flu and drug-related violence. It felt down at the heels and deserted, depressed yet oddly expensive.

Spacious San Carlos homes, many of them owned by norteamericanos, offer breathtaking vistas of the Sea of Cortez.

I mentioned this to Tommy, an affable Arizona native who’s been living in San Carlos on and off since the 1980s. He’d offered to take us out snorkeling for the day to earn a few extra bucks.

“You’d think when it’s not busy here, people would cut prices and offer some stuff for free,” he said. “That’s never been the mentality here. If business is cut in half people double their prices, thinking they need to make more money.”

I wondered if I’ve just become a spoiled, soft traveler too used to the comforts of home. If that’s the case, it’s time to leap out of my comfort zone and immediately head somewhere like Calcutta for an extended period.

But I don’t think that’s it. I’ve been to places that are wracked by poverty and more difficult to travel in than San Carlos and enjoyed them more. It seemed easier to find authenticity in those places, a reality that must exist somewhere away from San Carlos’ gringo restaurants and multi-million-dollar homes. As Gertrude Stein famously put it, “There is no there there.” Or if there was, I somehow missed it.

Preparing to anchor in Zorro Cove, where scenes from the 1998 movie The Mask of Zorro were filmed.

I’m probably in the minority, judging by the mostly favorable accounts of San Carlos I’ve read on websites and in travel guides. Even Hollywood has found appeal in the place—scenes from the 1970 movie Catch-22 were filmed near San Carlos, as were parts of the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro.

San Carlos did have its bright spots. The bay-and-desert landscape surrounding the town is beautiful. We saw an octopus while snorkeling in a lovely place named Martini Cove and ate some of the best shrimp tacos and hot dogs we’ve ever had at El Cheque, an unassuming takeout joint filled with locals.

We spent a couple of fun evenings at Club de Capitanes, a nautically-themed cruisers hangout offering various tasty dishes. We watched the sun go down at The Soggy Peso Bar, a beach bar that serves delicious “bloody caesars” made with clamato juice.

El Cheque serves up what may be the best hot dogs and shrimp tacos in Mexico, or anywhere.

We found our boat and I managed to arrive home in one piece. As I wrote previously, I was feeling a little apprehensive about the San Carlos trip, given my tendency for tropical mishaps that have more than once landed me in foreign medical clinics.

The worst thing that happened in San Carlos was a wardrobe malfunction involving my bikini top, just as I was being introduced to a fellow Canadian. He’d bought a boat down the dock from the one we’re buying and came over to meet us. As I popped out of the cockpit to say hello, I, well, popped out (thank you, polite Canadian guy, for pretending not to notice). We ran into him that night at a bar with his brother-in-law, and I managed to get over my mortification sufficiently to have a few drinks with them.

The Soggy Peso Bar is a must-visit while in San Carlos. Try the bloody caesars, made with fresh lime juice and clamato juice.

Every excursion into unfamiliar territory has merit, I believe, simply by offering a new experience that can’t be exactly replicated anywhere else. No matter how I feel about a place when I leave it, I invariably take something intangible and valuable with me. There’s always something to be learned, always at least one memory that will be stored, retrieved and probably laughed over a month or a decade down the road.

We may never fall in love with San Carlos, but that’s okay. We fell in love with the boat, and that’s more than enough for us.