Happily Homeless

Day 124-127 – This weekend was a put your feet up and chill weekend. We tried surfing for a day and the ocean gave us a few lessons of how powerful it can be. The excitement of surfing got us and we decided it would be worth looking for a cheap beginner’s board to share, since renting a board for the whole time we are here would cost more than buying one.

We also met some remarkable Oregonian surfers who became a temporary family camp with us. I think we will be meeting a lot people on our travels that we will camp or hang out with for some amount of time, creating short-term communities. It is a good way to get to know like minded people.

Making cowboy coffee; you have TJ on the left and Vincent on the right

We started our Spanish lessons on Tuesday, yay! We were very excited. We take them at the cultural center in town. Guillermo uses the Berlitz method of teaching, where you learn in conversational style and have a work book at home to do exercises in. We’ll see how it goes.

courtyard of the cultural center where we take our spanish lessons

The surf shop “Los Cerritos Surf Shop” has a great camping hostel right by the beach. This is where we have been staying when we camp at the beach. Daniel and Patty are very nice and helpful people, with great knowledge of the area. They rent out tents, sleeping bags, surf boards, give surfing lessons, and repair boards. Check out their website at www.todossantos.cc/ecosurfcamp.html

When is my owner coming back… He sat there the whole time, waiting for this master to come back to shore- what a caring dog!

gotta love playing in the water

Day 123 – After a nice morning stroll on the beach, we headed into Todos Santos to do some errands. This was our first of many visits to the town during our stay here. The roads in the main downtown area are mostly paved, which is not very common in a small town. There are numerous tourist shops filled with ceramics, glass ware, traditional souvenirs, and hammocks. There are also a number of restaurants that are extremely nice, but high priced. We really enjoy the smaller roadside stands, which are cheaper and have very good food – great for the budget!

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The through road in Todos Santos___________Los Adobes Cafe

We used the internet at Los Adobes Café, where the coffee beverages are the same price as they are in Seattle, wow! The café is set in a lovely desert garden patio and is a great atmosphere to surf the internet. While we were there we met a gentleman, Guillermo Bueron, who gives Spanish lessons in town. He is our new professor 🙂 So we are almost set for our time in Todos Santos – we have a place to stay and Spanish lessons.

We headed back to the beach to camp for the weekend. Can’t beat the beach life – a free place to camp! And since we picked up some wax for the surf camp on our way down, they are letting us use their toilet, plus we get a one day rental of a surf board. We’ll see if we can actually surf or not 😉

Los Cerritos – taken from the northern ridge of the beach

Day 122 – Todos Santos was our destination today. We hit La Paz and stocked up on a few food items and drove around the big tourist city. We’ll be checking it out more in detail at the end of the month when we take the ferry to mainland Mexico.

It was an hour before dusk when we arrived in Todos Santos, so we had to find a place to camp fairly quickly. First we tried a beach area south of Todos Santos called Playa San Pedro (aka Las Palmas), but it no longer allows camping. Plus you have to park and walk into the beach due to a muddy lagoon area on the road before the beach. So we headed to the next camping beach we knew of, Los Cerritos. This is where the surf shop, Los Cerritos Surf Shop, is located and who we are supposed to deliver the surf wax to. Patty was our contact person for the surf shop, but she wasn’t at the beach this evening. Daniel, her husband, who runs the shop out on the beach, greeted us with a caring smile and had us camp next to his place for the night.

our donkey guards to the beach.

road to Los Cerritos – the main beach outside of Todos Santos.

camp at Los Cerritos

Hwy 1 south heading out of Guerrero Negro.. completely flat and a “waste-land”

heading through the mountains to the east side of baja…

curvy roads!! Henry is becoming a stud at mountain roads.

lunch break in Loreto

The beach that we camped on, on our way down to Todos Santos.

Jason fishing

Art work by a clam 🙂

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The same beach we camped at as the last few pics.

Day 121 – Still driving south 🙂 , that is kind of redundant isn’t it; since we’ve been driving south since Alaska and will be for a few months until we hit Antarctica. More wasteland desert was our landscape today, I don’t think many people appreciate the desert, but I think it has a beauty to it that is unexplainable.

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My favorite catus________________Big catus, muy grande!

Baja is the vacation land for retired people and snowbirds from the United States and Canada. I can’t believe how many gringos we’ve ran into down here. I know this is where a lot of people retire or go on vacation, but I didn’t realize just how many. We took some advice for a camping spot from the Footprints guidebook and stayed at a beautiful beach south of Loreto and north of Puerto Esconidio, off of a dirt road. It was not super easy to find; the first dirt road we took brought us to a fishing village of gringos, with their RV’s parked under vernacular structures. This was not a place for us to camp since it was almost like a gated community. Across the bay on another beach we could see all the camping RV’s and so we got directions on how to get there. Down the next dirt road south was a line of RV’s and tents pitched right on the dunes, off of the rocky beach. Some people live there for months and for others it is just a place to vacation that is quiet and cheap. There is no water or any other services there, so you need to be self contained to stay. Though there is a boat harbor just around the bend. It was a perfect night of brilliant stars. I can’t believe how many stars there are when there are no lights around. No matter how many times I see the stars in utter darkness it is always a pleasant surprise.

Day 120 – Up at the crack of dawn – we’ve been getting up around 6.30 am every morning and going to bed around 9.00-10.00pm (well, Jason is going to bed around 8.00-9.00pm he’s the sleepiest person I know). It is nice to watch the sunrise each morning, and since it is getting dark at 5.30pm it is hard to stay up late. When I say it gets dark outside, it’s not like in the states where we have a hundred lights on and can’t even see the stars. In the countryside and in the small towns of Mexico it is pitch black with all the stars shining brightly – it is muy beautiful.

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Cati that is mostly found in Central Baja California. They were all over the place.

So today we stayed on highway 1 south, basically the only major highway in Baja, and rode through the desert. We saw so many different cacti and barren land – I loved it! Be warned: you must fill up your gas tank at El Rosario before heading further south, because the next gas station is not until your tank is almost empty 🙂

Too much desert driving….

This area had tons and tons of boulders – actually, mountains of them!

We headed to Bahia de los Angeles on highway 12. It has a gorgeous ocean view and we were going to spend the night there, but the town only takes cash and has no banks or atm’s. So, since we didn’t have much dinero on us at the moment (we put off taking any out, oops) we just took a look around. The town was very simple, though we didn’t spend much time there since we needed to head back to a bigger town to get cash for tonight. We put as much gas into the car as we had money on us and headed back to highway 1.

The view from the mountain while we drove down to Bahia de los Angeles.. the colors were much more brillant than it looks in the picture.

We stayed the night at Guerrero Negro, a decent sized town but not much interesting going on besides whale watching and overpriced accommodations.

Hello Viewers – We apologize for the long wait between posts, and for our homepage not being updated lately. No, it is not due to us having too much fun in the sun – though we are enjoying the beaches. Our blog has been down due to switching internet hosts. I will be updating about two days, per day, starting on Monday 🙂

The homepage will be updated as soon as we get our internet connection working on our laptop — we have had a few problems with our laptop 🙁

Thanks for your viewing and we hope to be fully update, asap!

– april & jason

Day 119 – Mexico, here we come! Or should I say Land of the Gringos, here we come! So many people from the states and Canada hang out down here. We crossed the border this morning, after arranging our car insurance at a drive through store. Yes; you can drive through and pick up your car insurance for Mexico! It was the cheapest and easiest thing in the world: off 0f I-5 heading to Mexico at San Ysidro, CA (I think second to last exit) – there is a company called Mexi that sells Ana Segurds insurance (literally right in front of you when you come off the exit ramp). They have very nice people that hook you up and even give you some maps of the area (they are okay maps) so you can drive in Baja. After our coverage was finalized we drove back onto the highway a noticed a sign staring at us that read – No Return To the US – so now we are stuck in our path!

The border crossing was as uneventful as sleeping. We went through a gate type area and just kept driving, along with everyone else. Jason asks me “are we in Mexico now?” and all I could say was “I think so”. Then we saw the other side of the freeway packed with cars and backed up for miles waiting to get into the US… that answered our question.

the usa and mexico border

Today we drove all the way into Ensenada, where we went to the immigration office to receive our tourist visa. If you are only staying in Baja, you don’t really need a tourist visa, but since we are heading over to mainland Mexico after this we had to get one – it cost about $21 usd each for 60 days. We also found out that our car didn’t need to get it’s tourist visa (yes, Henry gets one too) until La Paz, right before we get on the ferry to cross to mainland.

A blow-hole that we saw during low tide. During high tide it is supposed to be very impressive. Located on the Punta Banda Peninsula – La Bufadora. Sometimes it gets up to 80 feet above sea level!

the main street to La Bufadora, lined with vendors.

We drove the rest of the day until we hit Vicente Guerrero. We stayed at Mason Don Pepe’s RV and camping. It was suggested to us by the surf shop, they were very nice and gave us a list of places to stay and eat at on the way down. Pepe’s RV ground was very clean, with hot showers, and polite people – located just south of town.

Day 117/118 – Today we visited Kristin, a friend of mine from high school. Kristin and her family live in Vista, California. This was our last stop before Mexico. It was really nice to visit someone I haven’t seen in a long time. We got up the next morning, after a relaxing night, and went to a park and the beach with Kristin and her son, Brandon. He is very bright kid with an adorable smile!

Dave, Kristin, and Brandon

It was time to take off and head to Imperial Beach, where we picked up some wax for a surf shop in Todos Santos. Imperial Beach is about as far south as you can go in California (usa) without being in Baja California. It has a very nice pier that you can walk on or fish off of. We saw some people with compacted bows and spears on the pier that were fishing also. Our lodging that night was parking on the side of a residential neighborhood near the pier – can’t beat a free place to sleep.

Day 116 – LA – we hit the streets of Los Angeles in full swing early in the morning. First stop – Walt Disney Hall and the Music Center. Only pictures can describe Frank Gehry’s work, it was inspiring to see.

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Then, we viewed the plaza area of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels – very nice also.

A sculpture garden at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels

After that we visited El Pueblo de Los Angeles, which was okay. The market was a bunch of tourist shops with Mexican type items. Little Tokyo was next, though it took us a while to find it, and we roamed through a few not-so-tourist type streets.

Thom Mayne’s Caltrans Building in Los Angeles

Just a street scene in the Toy District.

We ate a great lunch of yakisoba in Little Tokyo. We have been excited and planning this since Wednesday. It was a fun area to walk around and I got to see parts I didn’t go to last time I was in LA.

While driving in LA, I received my official “welcome to the city” as we drove down highway 101 towards downtown. A not so happy man yelled at me quite loudly (my window was up and I still heard him) from his little sporty convertible, going about 75 mph, as I ever so speedily (as fast as a 1981 air cooled vw van can go) merged onto the highway. Hey mister, so sorry to slow your day down – it’s not like there aren’t four other lanes on the highway you could use also. Did I say four lanes, I mean five or six. I can’t believe how wide these highways are in this city. I have to say at one point the highway had more lanes than I could count safely (I would have gotten into an accident trying to figure it all out). Jason counted 8 lanes at one point and it never got smaller than 5 lanes – about 6 to 7 lanes was average for Los Angeles. This research was mostly done cruising down highway 405 south from Manhattan Beach and southbound on highway 101 into LA.

another sunset ends the day