The argument for El Salvador
The flight from Los Angeles to San Salvador International (SAL) takes roughly five and a half hours. From the airport, the La Libertad coast is forty-five minutes west on the coastal highway. Punta Roca — a right-hand point break that produces long, walling rides over a rock shelf, consistent enough that the WSL anchored a CT stop there — is within view of the terminal arrivals road. The arithmetic is not complicated: five and a half hours from the American West Coast, world-class right-hand points, warm water year-round at around 27°C, swell from the Pacific that delivers from March through November with a secondary window in December and January. For wave quality relative to travel time and cost, El Salvador is one of the genuinely undervalued propositions in international surfing.
The coast that matters runs roughly 280 kilometers from the Guatemalan border in the west to the Gulf of Fonseca in the east, and the Pacific-facing exposures along that length collect swell with a directness that the more sheltered coasts of Costa Rica and Panama cannot match. The breaks here are not a secret in the global surf community — Punta Roca has been in The Surfer's Journal, Surfline's destination guides, and international CT broadcast for years — but the boutique accommodation layer only caught up with the wave quality in the last five years, and the full picture of what exists in 2026 has not yet been assembled in one place. That is what this collection attempts to do.
The surf geography organizes into three distinct zones. The western corridor — El Zonte and El Sunzal, roughly 40 to 50 kilometers west of SAL — is where the Bitcoin Beach story played out and where the highest concentration of new boutique investment landed between 2018 and 2023. The central corridor — La Libertad city, Punta Roca, El Tunco, and the Surf City infrastructure zone at K59 — is where the WSL anchored and where the purpose-built tourism investment is densest. The eastern corridor — Las Flores, Punta Mango, and the road toward El Cuco and the Gulf of Fonseca — is where the serious wave travelers go when they want to trade infrastructure for swell exposure, and where the next round of boutique development is just beginning to form.
The wave character across the three zones is distinct. El Zonte offers a reef-shelf right that works on southwest and south swells, fun rather than challenging, readable by intermediate surfers and long enough to reward noseriding on the right board. El Sunzal is the high-performance counterpart — a right point that breaks with more speed and consequence, the wave that the competitive surfing community at La Libertad grew up on. Punta Roca is what the WSL is there for: a mechanical right-hand point over exposed rock that walls and sections with the regularity of a calibrated reef, capable of hosting elite surfing on south swells from 4 to 10 feet. It is not a beginner wave. Las Flores, in the east, is an A-frame peak that produces both rights and lefts of unusual consistency — it is regularly ranked among the top ten waves in Central America, which is not an empty claim. Punta Mango, further east, is a longer-period right-hand point that breaks over a rock ledge in a way that rewards powerful, committed surfing; it is less photographed than Las Flores but is the wave that serious surfers in the know tend to prefer.
The political stability arc matters and cannot be left out of any honest account of El Salvador's tourism surge. Between approximately 2016 and 2019, El Salvador had one of the highest per-capita homicide rates in the world — gang violence concentrated in the urban zones between San Salvador and La Libertad produced a security situation that effectively capped international surf tourism at a small, risk-tolerant cohort who had been coming for decades. Nayib Bukele's election in 2019 and his administration's subsequent gang-suppression campaign, which intensified dramatically in 2022 under a state of emergency that has been continuously extended, produced a measurable collapse in violent crime statistics. By 2023 the country was reporting homicide rates comparable to Costa Rica — a transformation in security perception, if not yet fully in security reality, that unlocked a wave of investment.
The honest version of that story includes the part that the tourism marketing omits: the state of emergency, which suspended due process protections, resulted in the mass incarceration of more than 75,000 people by mid-2024 under conditions that human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented as involving torture, arbitrary detention, and deaths in custody. The crime statistics went down. The civil liberties went down with them. Both of those things are true simultaneously, and the traveler who wants to understand what they are visiting should understand both. El Salvador in 2026 is genuinely safer on the street than it was in 2018; it is also a country governed by executive authority operating outside constitutional norms, with a political system that has been substantially restructured to reduce institutional checks. How to weigh that is a personal calculation, not an editorial one. We make it explicit here because the sanitized version — "security transformed under new leadership" — is incomplete.
The Bitcoin tourism wave ran from roughly 2021 to 2024 and was concentrated in El Zonte, the small coastal village that had piloted a community Bitcoin economy before the national Bitcoin Law of September 2021 made El Salvador the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. El Zonte — rebranded in international media as Bitcoin Beach — drew a specific cohort of crypto-adjacent tourists, digital nomads, and technology journalists who were not primarily surfers. The cafes and co-working spaces that opened in El Zonte in 2021 and 2022 represent a distinct layer of the infrastructure that still exists; so do some of the accommodation builds that were funded by that capital. What did not happen was the predicted mass tourism that the Bitcoin Law's proponents expected. The wave was real and concentrated; it did not transform the coast at the scale initially forecast. By 2024 the Bitcoin adoption rate among locals and domestic businesses had contracted significantly from the 2021 peak. What remained was the infrastructure investment — some properties, some restaurants, an improved road surface on the El Zonte coastal access — and a higher baseline international awareness of the coast as a surf destination. That awareness has outlasted the crypto-specific tourism and is now the foundation for more conventional boutique surf travel.
The WSL Surf City El Salvador era deserves its own accounting. The country began hosting WSL-sanctioned events in 2019; the 2020 WSL World Longboard Championships were held at Punta Roca, establishing El Salvador as a venue capable of hosting elite international competition. The Surf City branding — a government-led initiative that designated a corridor of the La Libertad coast as an integrated surf tourism zone — was the policy framework that organized the investment in infrastructure: the K59 highway marker became the shorthand for the central zone, road improvements reached El Zonte and El Tunco, and the WSL's continued presence at tier-2 Championship Tour stops through 2022 and 2023 kept the country in the broadcast rotation for international surf media. That broadcast exposure has a direct effect on boutique accommodation demand: when Punta Roca appears in WSL coverage, the searches for "El Salvador surf hotel" that follow are measurable and sustained. The Surf City designation has been more effective as a media and branding vehicle than as a physical transformation of the zone, but the branding has done real work.
The architectural language emerging across the coast reflects the investment structure. The El Zonte and Surf City corridor has produced properties in a modernist concrete-and-wood register: poured concrete walls, timber roof structures, open-air layouts oriented to the prevailing southwest breeze, pool decks positioned for swell views. The language draws from the same Central American coastal modernism visible in high-end Costa Rica builds, inflected by the particular light and heat of the Salvadoran Pacific. The eastern corridor — Las Flores, Punta Mango — is architecturally quieter: lower structures, more thatch and timber, a ranch aesthetic that reflects the agricultural character of the eastern departments. The contrast between the two corridors is not just about distance; it is about two different theories of what a surf property in El Salvador should look like.
I. El Zonte / La Libertad
The design heartland
El Zonte is a village of perhaps a few hundred permanent residents on a black-sand bay forty kilometers west of San Salvador International. Before the Bitcoin Beach experiment and before the 2019 security shift, it was a known wave among the La Libertad surf community — a right-hand reef break that peels over a shelf on the south end of the bay, consistent enough to organize sessions around but not consequential enough to have drawn international competitive surfing. The village was quiet in the way that many Central American surf towns were quiet: a few basic lodging options, fish sold from boats on the beach, a small school, and surfers who had discovered the place and did not advertise it.
What changed between 2019 and 2023 was layered and not reducible to any single cause. The security improvement opened the coast to a class of traveler who had previously redirected to Costa Rica or Nicaragua out of caution. Bitcoin Beach drew capital and media attention. Puro Surf Hotel — already operating since the mid-2010s as the reference boutique operator on the point — was positioned to receive the surge. New properties opened. The road improved. The village now has a coffee roaster, a co-working space, and a restaurant whose wine list would not embarrass a mid-tier Mexico City address. It also still has the wave, which is the reason any of the above matters.
Puro Surf Hotel
Puro Surf is the reference operator on the El Zonte point — the property that set the standard for what a boutique surf hotel in El Salvador could look like before the post-2019 investment surge made the question easier to answer. The hotel occupies a position directly on El Zonte Point, with a surf academy, board storage, and daily surf coaching program structured around the wave out front. The wave is the starting point, and everything else — the accommodation, the restaurant, the yoga program — is organized around access to it.
The property runs a surf academy that uses the El Zonte reef as its primary teaching break, which is appropriate: the wave is forgiving enough on smaller days for intermediate learners and consequential enough on solid south swells to push experienced surfers. The accommodation has expanded over time from the original lodge configuration toward a more considered room set; the aesthetic is modernist concrete and hardwood, open-air where the climate permits, with a pool area oriented to the point. This is not a property that is trying to be something other than a surf operation — the branding, the programming, and the physical layout all point the same direction. That clarity is the property's strongest attribute.
Puro Surf's position in the El Zonte landscape is worth noting for what it means about the post-Bitcoin moment. The property predates the Bitcoin tourism wave and has outlasted the acute phase of it. The guest mix in 2024 and 2025 is significantly more surf-focused and less crypto-curious than it was in 2022 — the travelers who are coming now are coming for the wave, not for the novelty of paying in Bitcoin. That is the stabilization that the El Zonte corridor needed, and Puro Surf is operating in a market more aligned with its actual product than was true three years ago.
Visit Puro Surf HotelGarten Hotel
Garten is one of the post-2019 builds in El Zonte — a smaller boutique property that arrived during the surf tourism investment surge and has settled into the market as a design-forward option for travelers who want the El Zonte location without the surf-academy programming of Puro Surf. The property is oriented toward the garden and pool rather than the wave directly, which positions it for guests who are surfing but not exclusively surfing — the couple where one person wants to be in the water at 6am and the other wants a comfortable base for the day. That is a legitimate market and it is one the El Zonte corridor needs more capacity to serve.
The architectural approach reflects the post-Bitcoin capital moment: concrete construction with considered tropical detailing, pool area, open-air dining. The garden work — the property name is not arbitrary — is more developed than is typical for properties in this price range in Central America. Verify current operational status and room count directly; property details as of mid-2025 suggest a small boutique room set. The wave is a short walk; the Puro Surf surf rental operation is accessible for guests not staying at Puro Surf directly.
Visit Garten HotelOlas Permanentes
The name translates as "permanent waves" — a phrase that functions as both a description of the El Zonte reef's swell consistency and as a statement of intent from an operator building for the long term rather than the Bitcoin-moment tourist influx. Olas Permanentes is a small boutique operation in El Zonte that represents the kind of independent-operator development that follows the first wave of larger investment: someone who understood what El Zonte was before the surge, built deliberately during it, and is positioned to hold its market position after the acute phase passes.
Operational details and room configuration should be verified directly before booking; the property was active through 2025 and the URL and booking channels are in operation. The aesthetic and positioning are consistent with the El Zonte modernist-concrete register rather than the older budget-surf-camp tier. For travelers who want a smaller, more intimate El Zonte base than Puro Surf's programmatic approach, this is a relevant option to assess.
Visit Olas PermanentesII. Punta Roca / Surf City
The WSL anchor
The stretch of coast from La Libertad city east through El Tunco to El Sunzal and Punta Roca is the geographic center of the Surf City initiative. La Libertad itself is a working port town — fishing boats, a wholesale fish market operating at dawn, the dense urban texture of a Salvadoran mid-sized city — and the surf tourism infrastructure does not exist in the city itself but in the corridor of properties that line the cliffs and access roads between El Tunco and the Punta Roca point. El Tunco is the high-volume backpacker and mid-range surf lodging zone; the properties worth naming in this collection sit on either side of it, away from the noise concentration of El Tunco's main street.
Punta Roca is the break that made El Salvador's international surf reputation. It is a right-hand point over exposed rock in front of La Libertad, and on a solid south or southwest swell it produces the kind of mechanical, high-quality walls that competitive surfers look for: consistent shape, multiple sections, a takeoff that rewards commitment, and a finish in deep water rather than on the reef. The WSL Longboard Championships in 2020 confirmed what the La Libertad surf community had known for decades. The K59 highway marker — kilometer 59 on the Carretera del Litoral — became the Surf City zone's informal address, and the government investment in signage, road access, and infrastructure concentrated in this section.
Hotel Roca Sunzal
Hotel Roca Sunzal is the historic anchor property at Punta Roca — one of the earliest purpose-built surf hotels on the La Libertad coast and the property that set the physical template for what this stretch of cliff-top accommodation looks like. The site is on the bluff above El Sunzal point, with views directly over the break. The property has expanded over the years from its original room count; the current configuration includes rooms and suites at various price points, a pool deck positioned for swell observation, and a restaurant that is a genuine reference point in the Surf City zone rather than a convenience offering.
The architecture is older than the post-2019 builds and makes no pretense of competing with them on contemporary design language. What it offers instead is what older properties on well-placed surf real estate always offer: the position, the established garden, and the institutional knowledge of a property that has been receiving surf travelers for long enough to understand what they need and what they don't. The reef at El Sunzal is out the window; Punta Roca is a short drive. For travelers who want the Surf City zone with the context of a property that was there before the branding existed, Roca Sunzal is the reference.
Visit Hotel Roca SunzalCasa de Mar Hotel & Villas
Casa de Mar sits at the edge of El Tunco, far enough from the main party strip to maintain a different atmosphere while remaining walkable to the breaks. The property is organized around a villa model — accommodation in detached or semi-detached units rather than a hotel block, which gives it a residential scale that reads better at the boutique tier than a conventional hotel footprint in this location would. The villas open onto gardens and pool areas; the larger units work for small groups traveling together, which is the common format for serious surf travel where board logistics favor renting a vehicle and traveling four to six people.
Casa de Mar represents the mid-range of the Surf City zone's boutique accommodation — not the historic anchor position of Roca Sunzal, not the price point of some of the newer post-2022 builds, but a competent, honest operation in a well-chosen location. El Tunco itself is worth understanding clearly: it is the most accessible point on the La Libertad coast, which means it is also the loudest and the most variable in quality. The properties that work in El Tunco are those that have created a clear separation from the main street's nightlife concentration, either by position, by physical barriers, or by the culture the property projects. Casa de Mar manages this with reasonable success.
Visit Casa de Mar Hotel & VillasWP Surf Hotel
WP Surf Hotel is one of the newer properties in the Surf City corridor — a contemporary build that arrived during or after the post-2019 investment surge and positions itself explicitly within the WSL Surf City branding. The property targets the international surf traveler who wants purpose-built amenities: board storage, rinse-down stations, a pool oriented to the break views, a room inventory sized for surf groups. The architecture sits in the contemporary concrete-and-timber register that defines the corridor's newer construction, and the operational approach is more programmatically surf-focused than the older properties.
Verify current operational status and room pricing directly; the Surf City zone has seen enough turnover in new properties since 2020 that individual operational details require confirmation. What is reliable is the position — the K59 zone, proximate to Punta Roca and El Sunzal, with all the infrastructure advantages of being in the government-designated surf tourism zone — and the design intent, which is to serve the post-WSL-era traveler who arrives with boards and a daily schedule built around tides.
Visit WP Surf HotelIII. Las Flores / the east coast
The boutique escape
Las Flores is a roughly three-and-a-half-hour drive from SAL on the Carretera del Litoral heading east — past San Salvador, past Usulután, through the agricultural departments that constitute most of El Salvador's physical geography away from the capital and the La Libertad coast. The road is good for most of its length. The eastern coast that the road eventually reaches is different from the La Libertad corridor in almost every dimension: fewer people, more consistent offshore winds, a wave at Las Flores that breaks as an A-frame peak over a rock shelf with a regularity and quality that travel writers who discover it tend to describe in superlatives.
The wave justifies the distance. Las Flores produces both a right and a left from the same peak — the right is the more photogenic and consistent, a long walling ride with multiple sections; the left is shorter but can produce a quick cylindrical barrel in the right conditions. On a solid swell it is the best wave in the country that is accessible to a broad range of ability levels. Punta Mango, further east and accessible by boat from the Las Flores zone or by rough road, is a step up in consequence: a right-hand point over a rock shelf that rewards powerful, late-drop surfing and offers some of the longest rides on the Salvadoran coast when the swell aligns. Punta Mango has been on the shortlist of El Salvador's serious waves for decades; the accommodation infrastructure near it remains limited, which is partly what defines its character.
The east coast's architectural register is quieter than the La Libertad corridor by intention and by economics. The properties here are lower-density builds in timber and local materials, ranch-inflected rather than modernist-concrete-urban. The remoteness that makes the east coast difficult to reach also protects it from the saturation that compressed the La Libertad boutique tier as Surf City grew. The travelers who come here are further along the wave-quality priority spectrum and less interested in the WSL visibility machine. That self-selection produces a different atmosphere.
Las Flores Surf Resort
Las Flores Surf Resort is the primary operator at the eastern point break — the property that opened the east coast to international surf tourism and has held its position as the reference accommodation for Las Flores since its establishment. The resort sits directly on the Las Flores point, with the A-frame peak visible from the common areas. The accommodation is bungalow-format construction in local timber, organized around a central pool and dining area that functions as the social core of the property. This is not a hotel with a surf program; it is a surf operation with hotel amenities, and the distinction is felt in how the daily schedule works.
Las Flores Surf Resort runs a board rental program, a surf guiding operation, and boat transfers to Punta Mango — the package that the serious surfer who has driven three and a half hours from the airport wants. The meals are served family-style or buffet, oriented toward a communal guest experience rather than private-dining formality, which is the correct choice for the guest type the property attracts. The rooms are not designed to impress; they are designed to be clean, functional, and comfortable enough that a guest who has surfed four hours wants to return to them rather than resent them. That standard is harder to achieve consistently than it sounds, and Las Flores Surf Resort meets it.
The east coast from Las Flores to Punta Mango to El Cuco is still the quieter alternative to the La Libertad corridor, and Las Flores Surf Resort is the reason that alternative is viable for international travelers who want a structured base rather than a self-organized camp. The A-frame at Las Flores breaks year-round on south and southwest swells; March through October is the peak window. The property fills early in peak season. Book early, bring your own leash.
Visit Las Flores Surf ResortPunta Mango Surf Resort
Punta Mango is accessible by boat from Las Flores — roughly 40 minutes on a panga in calm conditions — or by a rough coastal track that requires four-wheel drive and local knowledge. The resort at the point is small: a handful of cabins or bungalows in local timber, a communal dining structure, a generator for electricity. This is not a property that competes on amenity depth; it competes on wave access. The right-hand point at Punta Mango is a long, powerful ride over a rock shelf that produces a distinctly different surfing experience from Las Flores — more speed, more commitment required, more consequence on a big swell. It is the wave that the guests staying at Las Flores Surf Resort take the boat to on their best day of the trip.
Punta Mango Surf Resort — puntamango.com — represents the easternmost edge of El Salvador's boutique surf accommodation tier. The guest profile is intermediate-to-advanced surfers traveling in small groups who have already done the more accessible breaks and want something with fewer people and more consequence. Operational details should be verified directly; the remote location means that online information is less reliably current than it is for the La Libertad properties. The resort is a destination in its own right for the surfer who already knows what Punta Mango is; for the traveler who doesn't, start at Las Flores and take the boat there on day three.
Visit Punta Mango Surf ResortMiramundo
Miramundo is a smaller boutique option in the Las Flores zone — a hillside or clifftop property with views over the break, operating at a scale and price point positioned between the full-service Las Flores Surf Resort and a self-catering arrangement. Properties in this format are common in the east coast zone as the second and third tier of investment has followed the primary operators: someone who saw Las Flores Surf Resort fill up and built a smaller, more intimate alternative nearby, often with a design sensibility that reflects its owner's preferences more directly than a professionally operated surf resort does.
Verify current operational status directly. The Las Flores zone has seen several properties in this category open between 2021 and 2025, not all of which have maintained consistent operations. When Miramundo is operational, it represents the kind of smaller-scale boutique accommodation that the east coast needs more of — the option between the established resort and an unstructured rental — and is worth assessing as part of a Las Flores itinerary. The wave access is the same as Las Flores Surf Resort; the experience is quieter and more private.
IV. El Cuco / the frontier east
The next investment wave
East of Las Flores and Punta Mango, the coast continues toward the Gulf of Fonseca and El Cuco — a beach town at the end of a paved road that is genuinely off the international surf tourist map as of 2026. El Cuco has a long beach break, a modest population, and the kind of minimal infrastructure that characterizes a destination before the investment cycle finds it. The wave is not at the level of Las Flores or Punta Mango; it is a beach break rather than a point break, variable rather than consistent. The reason to mention El Cuco in this collection is not the current wave quality or the current accommodation tier but the trajectory.
Sunset Beach Hotel El Cuco
Sunset Beach Hotel El Cuco is the primary named accommodation in the El Cuco zone — a beach-facing property that represents the current ceiling of the accommodation tier in this stretch, which is to say it is a modest operation that serves the domestic tourism market and the occasional international traveler who has driven past Las Flores looking for something even more removed. The property does not reach the design or operational standard of the Las Flores operators. It is included here as a geographic marker rather than as an editorial endorsement: El Cuco is the furthest east the paved coastal road reaches, and knowing what exists there is useful for planning a full-coast itinerary.
The El Cuco zone is plausibly the next area where surf-tourism investment finds a foothold in El Salvador, for the same reasons the Las Flores zone was the next zone after the La Libertad corridor: wave access that is not exhausted by existing demand, land prices that have not yet been bid up by the tourism capital that followed the WSL and the Bitcoin Beach attention. Whether that investment arrives in the next three years or the next ten depends on factors — security trajectory, road infrastructure, the broader trajectory of El Salvador's political and economic governance — that are genuinely uncertain. The beach is there. The wave is secondary.
Visit Sunset Beach Hotel El CucoWhat to watch, and what to know
The 2024 to 2026 period in El Salvador surf tourism is best described as consolidation. The acute Bitcoin and WSL-novelty phases have passed; the properties that were built on opportunistic capital rather than operational competence are sorting themselves out; the operators who were there before the surge and the ones who built carefully during it are converging on a market that is now structured differently from the 2018 baseline.
The La Libertad corridor — El Zonte, El Tunco, El Sunzal, Punta Roca — is now the most developed boutique surf corridor in Central America, measured by property count, design quality, and international traveler familiarity. The claim is defensible: Costa Rica's Nosara and Tamarindo zones are comparable in design tier, but the wave quality at Punta Roca and El Sunzal, combined with the proximity to SAL (forty-five minutes rather than Costa Rica's multi-hour drives from SJO or LIR), gives the Salvadoran corridor an efficiency advantage that the market has recognized. A week at El Zonte or Surf City costs roughly 40 percent less than an equivalent week in Nosara or Santa Teresa for comparable accommodation quality — a spread that will continue to narrow as El Salvador's tourism infrastructure matures, but that remains meaningful in 2026.
The east coast is the piece of the market to watch for the next three to five years. Las Flores Surf Resort and Punta Mango Surf Resort are the anchors of an eastern corridor that has room for several more boutique operators before it reaches the saturation that characterizes the La Libertad zone. The wave quality at Las Flores is genuinely exceptional — the A-frame consistency on south swells rivals anything in Central America — and the remoteness that currently limits demand will compress as the road infrastructure improves and as the international surf community's awareness of the eastern coast deepens. The properties that build in the Las Flores to El Cuco stretch in the next two to four years will have the advantage of the early operators: position, pricing power, and the reputational benefit of being there before the wave of visitors that follows good writing about a good wave.
The political context question cannot be resolved editorially. Traveling to El Salvador in 2026 means traveling to a country where the security environment has genuinely improved from a horrific 2016–2018 baseline, and where that improvement was achieved through methods that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have documented as including systematic due process violations, deaths in custody, and the incarceration of individuals with no verified gang connections. The state of emergency that enabled this has been extended continuously for more than two years. The political system has been restructured in ways that reduce institutional constraints on executive power — the Supreme Court was reconstituted by Bukele-aligned legislators in 2021, and the 2024 elections produced a second Bukele term under a constitutional arrangement that was itself constitutionally disputed.
None of that makes the wave at Punta Roca smaller. None of it makes the boutique accommodation tier at El Zonte less designed. What it does mean is that the traveler who is making a thoughtful choice about where to spend a surf vacation is making that choice with a degree of political complexity that is higher than it was for Costa Rica, Portugal, or Mexico. Some travelers will weigh that complexity and go anyway, concluding that tourism revenue is part of an economic ecosystem that is separate from political governance. Some will conclude the opposite. Both positions are defensible. The honest answer is that the wave is there, the hotels are there, and the political context is not separate from the decision — it is part of it.
What El Salvador offers, assessed as directly as possible: the best right-hand point breaks in Central America accessible within an hour of a modern international airport, a boutique accommodation tier that has moved from thin to substantive in five years, a cost structure that is still favorable relative to Costa Rica, and an east coast that is undervisited relative to its wave quality. The country that had more surf-tourism investment than any other in Central America between 2020 and 2024 now has the inventory to receive the traveler who arrives with boards and a tide chart. Whether to be that traveler is a question each person answers separately.