ONE MORNING toward the end of our trip, I'm out in the ocean off Playa Sunzal before the sun rises. Floating on my board, watching surfers from all over the world, I make a decision: No more half measures.

When a rush of whitewater crashes over me, instead of clamoring ignominiously to my hands and knees, I just stand up. Suddenly I'm surfing. I'm in a catlike crouch just like you see real surfers doing, and the board is planing along the creamy blue water natural as can be, and I'm thinking something articulate, like Wow!

I believe things are going surprisingly well when I notice the front end of the board beginning to nose-dive. I'm catapulted into the air and thenceforth, in surfing patois, "worked"—spun upside down and sideways underwater. When I finally breach, gasping uncontrollably and breathing in brine, I don't realize that my surfboard is at that very moment performing a midair pirouette directly above me. My leash jerks and the board strikes me flat on top of my head, knocking me facedown back into the water. I assume my head is bleeding profusely and that I will have a splendid gash worthy of a surfing war story, but, crawling to shore, I'm disgusted to find myself utterly uninjured.

For the next half-hour I just sit there in the baking black sand waiting for my headache to subside and my ego to recover. On the bright side, it dawns on me that I haven't thought about work for days.

There are other surprises, too. The rock climbing turns out to be just the opposite of surfing: nonexistent. Pat, Johnnie, and I do an all-day recon up the west coast then back through the mountains, banging through cobblestone villages and asking blue-uniformed, sweating-to-death-in-the-hot-sun, machine-gun-toting soldados for directions. We never find anything worth getting out the rope for. This normally would have pissed me off, but not now: I've got more pressing things to do.

Sometimes we surf early in the morning, sometimes we sleep in. We have chicken fights in the swimming pool, throw the Frisbee, toss the Nerf, play cards, search for starfish and frogs. We go to El Zócalo, a restaurant run by Jose Antonio López and his extended family in the nearby village of Conchalion, for pupusas con queso, enchiladas de res, tacos de pollo, and micheladas—a margarita-cum-cerveza that combines lemon juice, ice, salt, pepper, hot sauce, and beer.

A couple of days before we leave, thoughts of home begin to creep back in. We know reentry will be rough—the honeymoon glow of even the best vacation begins to fade after a week back at work. This is all the more reason to plan the next escape. Sitting on the beach, Sue and I start scheming a summer of climbing and camping in the mountains of Wyoming. Pat and Erika talk about taking six months off to travel through South America.

We spend the remainder of our vacation lounging in the shady, luxuriant hammocks along the cliff, reading and snoozing to the faint sound of surf thundering far below.

I'm not a napper, and to be honest I've never been a big fan of hammocks—they're a little too decadent for me. But damn if, after seven or eight days, I don't start drifting off to sleep with a book over my face as the sun crawls higher in the El Salvador sky. I'm on vacation, after all.