Bonus Update: On the road to Mulege!

Made it through the biggest day of driving, San Quintin (pronounced: San keen-teen... gringo) to Mulege (pronounced: mool-uh-hay... whiteboy)- if you didn't check out the map from the previous post (Day 2) give it a look and you can see where we are. I just got done eating a giant bowl of pozole (a tasty mexican soup) and I am exhausted. Cool that this little hotel had wi-fi access because here I am with a bonus road update for you!

We did close to 9 hours of driving today, that's the longest stretch. Tomorrow we'll be on the road for about six hours and we should be surfing by 1 or 2pm. Can't wait to jump into that warm, blue water. The first surf is always the sweetest- you're reminded of what it's like to surf in trunks... and it's December!

This is a shot out the window of the truck as we zoomed by the harbor at Santa Rosalia. Santa Rosalia is the first town you come to as you cross the peninsula from Guerrero Negro to the Sea of Cortez. If Popeye was going to live in Baja, this is where he'd live. It's crusty and colorful and cool- someday I'll schedule in a couple more hang out days on the way down to paddle all these cool little spots. There's tons of flatwater paddling opportunities in Baja.

This is pretty standard in Baja. You can go zooming down the road for a hundred miles and then you're stuck behind a slow truck for twenty minutes. The road from TJ to Cabo is much narrower than any highway in the United States. If a truck is coming at you, there's a definite white knuckle moment right when it goes freight-training by you. You are separated by what seems like inches. It's really very close. Close enough, in fact, for people to have their mirrors swiped right off their vehicles- happened to me once and I don't even have the big ol' elephant ear mirrors that you see on big Ford or Dodge diesels. If I owned one of those trucks, the first thing I'd do would be to take those big old flappers right off. A friend in an F250 lost a mirror and the window of the back seat when his got smacked outside of Loreto. Not fun.

Here's the road through Catavina. Imagine traveling hundreds of miles through dry, hot, barren desert then working through a giant boulder garden and finding yourself driving over water running out of a desert spring in an old river bottom. It's weird to think that water just oozes out of the ground at some points in the desert. But it does and here in Catavina it comes out enough to support palm trees including the blue palm which is a Catavina specialty. You couldn't really call Catavina a town, there's probably twenty people who live there year round- but it's an interesting place to check out. There's an airstrip tucked back off the highway and there's an old timer who's been there for decades, living in his concrete home that's dug into the side of a mountain. Baja's full of odd stuff like that.