My Baja Trip

Oh man, what a trip, what a drive. Todos Santos is a sweet little town, about 50 miles north of Cabo. Sort of an artsy ex-pat community and a sleepy little town. I went to visit for the first time a friend who's lived there for about 7 years. Her daughter is having her first child (my friend's first grandchild) and she wanted to be there, and with her vehicle. Needs to bring back goods for her store. She asked me to help her drive up (Nor Cal). She's 67 and thought perhaps the drive might be too much for her by herself. Only about 1500 miles.

Her house and estate are sweet. She's planted trees and shrubs of various sorts and made a small green oasis. She operates a small nursery, selling trees to locals and expats.

The photos are a tad big - a tool I just learned of helps - if you press Ctrl - (Ctrl minus) makes it all smaller, Ctrl + (no need to include shift key) makes it bigger. The first photo is of her new bodega, or store, where she plans to sell a variety of products – health items and organic gardening products. It served as my guest house for now. The second is just to the left of the bodega, showing some of her nursery and her carport. The rest are of the main house, of course. The Toyota RAV4 ('95) is a dandy little rig. Surprisingly fast for a four cylinder automatic and it gets 28 mpg highway. You really want a high clearance rig for the streets around town.

The highway was a trip – two lanes with no shoulder about 99% of the time. Kept me on my toes. Is a lot more scenic that way. More primitive looking. Most all of it recently repaved. Good thing as the several portions not yet repaved were pretty rough, and thankfully short. Traffic pretty light until we got about 100 miles south of the border. Often we'd pull over and it would be several minutes before another car went by, and this on the main highway. Quite a few semis and they all seemed pretty well driven. The scenery was unlike any I'd seen. Big cactus, palm trees an some trippy rock formations. I saw several huge mounds of rocks, standing in sharp contrast to the earthen clad hills nearby. It's been a wet one this year, a hurricane last fall – she said she'd never seen it so green. Quite green close to the border.

All in all, I want to drive it again. I'm starting to understand the ex-pat retiree thing a bit better. I may well do it. I'm seriously amping up my efforts to learn Spanish.

Beautiful pics. I miss my Navy days, when the ship would go down to Cabo and the surrounding areas for a week or R and R.

That's one part I saw little of. She picked me up at the airport in San Jose Cabo and we just drove by Cabo San Lucas. I was beat, didn't want to mess around anyway. Someday.

Cool CMac. I love Baja.

I'm within striking distance & saw Tijuana from the Double Peak vista point today, but alas this will be a close as I get.

I enjoyed my one trip to Tijuana years ago. We went around it this time. Turned east at Ensenada. She was convinced that it would be time efficient to drive east to Tecate to cross. I don't have enough experience to know for certain but I have heard of 3 hour waits at the Tijuana/San Ysidro crossing. We were a half hour at Tecate. That's a rough little town.