President's Weekend in Nosara, Costa Rica: A Family Wellness Reset | Park City Moms

If you've moved to Park City from somewhere with a real President's Week — the East Coast private-school version, the New England ski-week version, the version I grew up with in Upstate New York where everybody and their cousin showed up at Killington for seven full days — the PCSD calendar is going to disorient you. We get President's Day. Singular. Monday off. That's it. No ski week. No five-day window. A long weekend that is, technically, only one day longer than a normal weekend.

Which is why, four years running, the Taylor family has chosen to bend the calendar a little. We pull Hazel and Owen on the Friday before, we add the Tuesday after, and we go somewhere warm and salty and full of yoga shalas. The teachers at Jeremy Ranch Elementary are completely fine with it — both kids are ahead in their French Immersion track, and a missed Friday and Tuesday is the cheapest version of family sanity I've ever bought. This year: Nosara, Costa Rica. And reader, we needed the reset.

Why we left, honestly

Jeff has been climbing the ranks at the bank — the kind of climb that sounds good on paper and looks like a husband answering Slack at 9pm in real life. The kids had been sick three times since January (the Jeremy Ranch crud is its own ecosystem). I had just wrapped up a four-week sub block at the studio and my own practice was, frankly, threadbare. We were a family in need of softening.

a person holding a surfboard walking on a beach — Nosara surf school morning. Owen took five waves on his belly before he even attempted to stand. Worth every dollar of the flight.

President's weekend was the first Cloudflare-clear window on the calendar. Jeff cancelled two meetings, which for him is a spiritual act. We booked.

Why Nosara, specifically

I've been to most of the wellness-coded Costa Rican towns on the Pacific side over the years — Santa Teresa, Dominical, Manuel Antonio for a beat. Nosara is the one I keep coming back to with a family. Three reasons:

A person climbs a gigantic tree — Hazel and Jeff on the rope bridge in the cloud forest. The intention of this trip every February is to remind the kids the world is not all snow.

The surf at Playa Guiones is a forgiving beach break. Owen is five. He needs forgiving.
There's a real yoga community, not a yoga aesthetic. Bodhi Tree, the original shalas, teachers I know by name from teacher-training networks. I can drop into a 7am class and feel like I'm home.
The town itself is small, walkable-ish, and the kids can run around the open-air restaurants without me having to be a hawk.

What our days actually looked like

I'm a believer in light structure. Wellness without rhythm is just vacation, and vacation without rhythm is just chaos with palm trees. Our shape:

People gather in a lush rainforest setting — Shala at sunrise. I taught a sunrise class for a week here in 2018 and it ruined every Park City studio for me forever.

6:30am. I walk to a class at the shala. Sun salutations under a thatched roof. The frogs are still going. I cry once a trip; this trip it was Sunday morning, set to a Krishna Das playlist.
8:30am. Family breakfast at the rental. Eggs, fruit, the bread Jeff swears is the best in Central America.
9:30am. Surf lessons at Guiones. We use Safari Surf — they're fantastic with little ones. Owen on a foam board with an instructor in the whitewash. Hazel paddling out a little farther with Jeff. I sit on the sand with a coffee, and that, too, is a practice.
Lunch + nap window. The non-negotiable. Costa Rican afternoons are hot and you do not fight them.
4pm. Family yoga. I lead it. Twenty minutes, on the deck, the four of us. Owen is mostly horizontal. Hazel takes it seriously. Jeff is in child's pose for most of it and that is fine — that is the win.
Sunset at the beach. Every night. Non-negotiable in the other direction.

Pulling kids on a Friday: how that conversation goes

I want to be honest about this because I know it's contested. In our experience — and I am writing this as someone whose children are at the top of their French Immersion class — pulling Hazel and Owen for a Friday and a Tuesday around President's Day has never been a problem with their teachers. I email two weeks out. I tell them where we're going. I ask if there's anything I should make sure the kids work on. The answer has uniformly been some version of: bring them back rested, please.

A group of people standing on top of a river — Family on the river. Listen to your body, listen to the heat, and surrender to the slowest tour you can find.

Travel is education. A five-year-old learning to read the ocean is doing physics. An eight-year-old ordering her own breakfast in Spanish at a Costa Rican panadería is doing language acquisition (and getting big-sister bragging rights). The teachers at Jeremy Ranch get it. PCSD gets it. We are not pretending we're at a doctor's appointment. We are saying: our family is going somewhere warm to be together, and we will return softer humans.

The Jeff piece

The thing about my husband is that he is, on paper, the most relaxed man in the world. Grew up skiing White Pass, Snoqualmie, Whistler — Pacific Northwest kid, big mellow energy. In practice, banking has made him a person who keeps his phone face-up at dinner. Costa Rica did the thing it always does. By Saturday night he had stopped checking. By Sunday morning he was actually present at breakfast. By Monday he was the one suggesting the family yoga session. That is the entire ROI of this trip.

man standing on rocky shore near waterfalls during daytime — Waterfall hike in Montezuma. Hazel slipped twice, Owen cried once, both of them asked to go back the next morning.

The small brag I will allow myself

While a lot of our friends were back home doing the Park City President's Day thing — which, to be clear, is lovely; PCMR (Jeff still calls it The Canyons, please don't @ him) on a holiday Monday is a vibe — we were on a beach in Guanacaste teaching our children to surf and breathe. The Utah powder will still be there. The powder is always still there. President's Day weekend is for reset, and the reset has to be load-bearing.

field of trees near body of water — Final morning at the dock. A 40-degree Park City Tuesday is waiting on the other side. The reset has done its work.

If you're staring down PCSD's stingy little President's weekend and feeling robbed of your East Coast ski-week birthright, take this as permission. Add a Friday. Add a Tuesday. Tell the teachers in advance and tell them honestly. Pick somewhere warm with a yoga community and a forgiving beach break. Set the intention before you board the plane. The reset is real, the reset is needed, and the reset is, I'd argue, the whole point of a working-mom-with-help kind of life — that we use the windows we have, well.