Adventures in quatro a quatro

on MAY 6, 2018

Last weekend was entirely focused on packing up all of our household goods and prepping the Menaje de Casa for shipping. It was tight, but timing wasn’t in my favor as I had to be in Austin for a wedding this weekend (congratulations Kelly and Nick!) and Switch is coming up on Tuesday to get the paperwork stamped at the Mexican consulate in San Francisco, so it had to get finished. There have been many firsts on this journey (first time living alone, first time being separated for this long) but I now thoroughly empathize with all the singles out there who have to move on their own. Man, that is a lot of work.

But, I don’t want to talk about that, and instead talk about our adventurous road trip north of La Paz. I flew down the weekend before last to spend a week in Mexico and was actually able to take a couple days off (the first in almost a year). My request was to get out into Baja and find a deserted beach somewhere to bum around on. We had a couple places we wanted to check out, but decided to head North of La Paz at the recommendation of our neighbors. They had stayed on a beach near San Evaristo for a month about 10 years back and described a beach strewn with agates. A weekend of lazy rock hounding sounded awesome to me, so we packed up the trailer and headed North. The road was great here (paved) until we ran into San Juan de la Costa – a small town with a mine at the end of the paved part of the road.

Just after we passed the mine, the landscape changed dramatically. These beautiful plateaus and painted mountains rose out of the skyline and we started noticing stripes of green to dark teal layers interspersed between the rose pink and cream. A few mines exist on this route, but they are phosphorous, so nothing to explain the green. We did a few internet searches and couldn’t find anything definitive, but we’re guessing copper?

The road had been pretty good until this point, but we started encountering lengthening stretches of very deep washboards, which were unpleasant but doable. Apparently, however, they were too much for the trailer wheel and at one particularly bad stretch, we lost a wheel when the bolts sheared completely off. Luckily, Switch had some extra bolts so I pulled out the beach umbrella to shield from the mid-day sun and we got to work putting it back on. For those of you who have ever driven Baja roads, this is a pretty typical experience. Many Cardones along the roads (a cactus similar to the Saguaro in the Southwest United States) feature ghosts of past road trauma in abandoned tires slung over their arms.

The next stretch of road was a winding, rough road through the mountains, luckily paved at some of the “peaks”, but still achievable. The trailer adds a bit more stress in steep situations because it can literally push the car downhill at times, but we made it through and started looking for the beach to camp on. We overshot a bit based on where we through the camping was. Out at the beach – looking for fire pits with the sun getting low in the sky, we decided to pull off the road to camp for the night and deal with it in the morning. Unfortunately, we almost immediately got stuck in the sand and after about an hour of digging out the wheels and reinforcing the ground, we decided to call it officially stuck and hunker down for the night.

switch looking worried in lupe sierra’s restaurant in san evaristo

As  the stress from the situation had led to a restless night’s sleep for both of us, we pulled over on the next road south to grab a siesta. Switch slept a bit while I read my Baja Plant book. Ironically, this was the road we would have taken to get to the good beach camping. WAH wah. Still nervous about sand, we continued on to the next beach which in theory could have a better road due to the lighthouse at the end. Luckily the road was fine, so we drove down and joined the two fishermen who were already camped there and made some food. We spent the evening under an epically beautiful sky, which helped us (or at least me) remember why we do this.

This was definitely a learning trip. Here’s a list of a few things we learned, not in any particular order:

• Two new 4×4 gears (4L and 4H) which are helpful in tough situations

• Buy and carry sand tracks

• Long roads that terminate in Baja typically are good in the beginning, get worse in the middle and then REALLY bad right near the end – that’s why they stop

• Blooming Palo Verde bring lots of honey bees to the desert

• Cacti cross species hybridize on their own which makes it difficult for botanists to identify them properly

• Pass when offered the second harvest of Pitaya Dulce (I’ll explain in another post)

• Mexicans are an amazing and helpful people

• Pay it back whenever you can

<3 <3 <3