The beaches are all public but the chairs belong to the resorts so you need the right colored wrist band. Even though they are public, it sometimes takes a little exploring to get to them without going through someone else’s lobby. No one bothers us cutting through other timeshares but the condos are fussier.

The locals seem to know what’s on- and off-limits; more are off for them than us. When you are bringing a couple kids, baskets of food, beach chairs, inner tubes, and umbrellas, you are fairly easy to pick out. If you “belong”, you show up with nothing expecting it all to be provided. (Kids are not provided.)

The picture in the upper left is a “public” beach directly behind a resort; the one at the bottom has a row of bars, restaurants, and shops; more favored by the locals. The upper right is one public access to Playa Langosta; the shops aren’t thriving this week.

Here is an even deeper study on how we are forced to live versus our neighbors; clockwise from the upper left: us, us, them, us, them.

We are still suffering through temperatures in the low 20s C with occasional showers. The street and beach vendors are the ones who really seem to be suffering.

They must coordinate the wrist bands somehow so no two resorts end up with the same color on the same week. Am I reduced to pondering issues of this magnitude? Or maybe this is another version of the map-coloring problem: How many colors do you need so that no two adjacent states are the same color?