hey, hey... yeah i took cheese and my cousin Tasha down to baja for a whirlwind road trip. we left Saturday morning and headed down the coastal hwy 1 to l.a. where we stayed with a friend for the evening in el Segundo. got up the next day and drove down to estero beach, south of ensenada and found a piece of shit room right next to a four star hotel where we spent the evening. we would have stayed at the hotel as prices there are ridiculously cheap, but most of the peninsula goes to the west coast for cooler weather right now. the hotel was pretty slick and we watched the sunset over the ocean while eating and drinking Cadillac margaritas... we danced to some live music and put cheese to bed early. Tasha and i stayed up late drinking on the back of the pick up truck. got up early and crossed the desert over to San Felipe the next day. the check points were fairly casual and only had to get out of the truck a couple of times in the hundred plus degree weather... stopped for lunch at one of the side of the highway cement boxed building touting lunch and cold beverages. two short heavy set women created a breakfast for us three and their two children showed the ladies where the toilet seat less loo was located and waited for each of them just out side the bathroom "door".
once in San Felipe we got some food and did some preliminary shopping, in short bursts left the air conditioned hotel room and explored the near vacant tourist destination... the hotel was sweet as it was right on the beach and had two bars and a restaurant on site.... spent the night drinking more local beverages and wasted some brain cells watching t.v.got up the following day and searched out some swim goggles and entered the sea of cortez for the first time. the water was near hut tub temperature and was exhausting to swim in for more than ten minutes at a time!! I'll bet it was around ninety five degree water. the beaches were long and flat and to get to water over your head we had to swim out four hundred yards or so. i opted to stay closer to the beach where i could keep an eye out on the beer we had stashed there. we had some phenomenal tacos at one of the restaurants built to hold sixty people or more and we were again one of the only people there... we took cheese out for her birthday and went to a club that could hold a thousand people but once again were the only people there. (save for a few of the bartenders friends.) got cheese to sing some Mexican karaoke and did some dancing to house music before we stumbled back to the truck to head back to the hotel... we went out for another swim about midnight, when surprisingly there were fifty or so people who were doing the same thing!
the tide was out so we could get deeper faster, but the water was only nominally cooler. we spent the rest of that evening doing somersaults and back flops onto the sandy spit we were laying out on under the sliver of moon.
the next day we had planned to spend shopping for touristy shit to bring back to the states, but by ten a.m. in the morning the temp had risen to a balmy 109 degrees, coupled with the 80 percent or so humidity we were rendered useless. it was so hot some stores power was not functioning and had no lights or fans... we decided unanimously to pack our shit and head for cooler beaches on the pacific side of baja.
drove back across the desert and meandered our way back through ensanada and up the coast to Porto nueavo. i had done some preliminary Internet searches of possible places to stay before we had left big sur and we drove up to the manned gate at one of the hotels there... checked into a two story condo directly on the ocean front and were quite happy with the accommodations... fully furnished and accoutremented with two bathrooms, coffee machine, microwave, fridge, two t.v.s, and a complete kitchen set, fold out couches, etc... it was a beautiful place. spent the evening shopping in the lobster village district located a block from the hotel where we sampled some local tequila and bartered for better prices with street vendors... watched a late night movie and finished off a case of beer and drank some over priced/fancy bottled tequila we had purchased to bring back...
after sitting through a couple of hours of border traffic and passing the border patrols silly questions we embarked on our ten hour drive home...
not too bad, we drove almost fifteen hundred miles in five days and were no worse for wear... a few lost brain cells left here and there, some money spent and good times were had....
