Author: Bob Elwood

February 11 to February 22, 2017—Heading north on Baja peninsula

What a difference a few thousand feet can make. For the last two weeks we enjoyed reliable weather in Los Barriles—highs in the high 70s, lows in the high 50s. The wind varied in intensity but the weather was always in the high end of the pleasant scale. We drove inland about 80 miles, climbing 1,600 feet to Rancho Verde campground near a national Bio-reserve. The temperature in the daylight was hot enough but went down to 38 at night. The area was forested and full of bird life, much more so than the coastal areas.

Water hookup and hot showers, $8US/night. There was no electricity but we have learned to conserve our resources for more extended stays off-grid.

A local man offered to sell us something called “marihuana;” jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said there was a field of it back in the forest. And it was a forested area, with real trees, the first we’d  seen in six or seven weeks. The national park contains the last or largest stand of pine oaks in Baja or the world, I’m not sure which because the national parks do not come with a lot of information. In fact you would never really suspect you were in one—there is no signage, no trailheads, no rangers, and there are private ranches here and there within the park. On the map is a green area indicating the park boundaries and its name and that is about all you get. Mark and Val and we spent a day in the park, about a half hour from our campground, walking the arroyos, taking lunch under a giant banyan or ficus  tree of some sort.

Seeing  a bobcat was the height of that trip. Mark and I explored several miles of trails around the camp, avoiding the ganja fields.

We stayed two nights in the mountains then descended back to the Gulf and the capital city La Paz. We returned to Campestre Maranatha on the outskirts of the city. It is not a particularly desirable spot but the better of two RV camp choices. We needed a number of supplies from the US-style mega-marts found in La Paz–cat litter, cat food, odds and ends.

An exceedingly rare midwinter rainstorm was forecast during our stay in La Paz; no rain is expected in Baja Sur until the fall. At one point they were calling for 3 inches of rain and 50 mph winds. By the day of the arrival of the storm the forecast was reduced to a half inch of rain and 30mph winds. After some discussion and research we all decided to ride the storm out at a hotel and booked rooms at the Hyatt overlooking the city. Quite a treat, the first hotel stay of our nine month trip, and a good call—it drizzled or rained all day and the winds were as predicted. The cats rode out the storm in the Scamp which was tucked away in a protected corner of the hotel grounds.

The road north from La Paz turns inland into the mountains and then back to the Gulf. We drove several hours to hotel that some sources had described as very accommodating to campers like us, and others described as being a dump with no facilities. (Mark had turned me on to a site called Overlander that logs first-person reports about off-road and obscure camping opportunities around the world. The conflicting reports about the hotel were both at the Overlander site and posted within a few weeks of each other. ) The Hotel Tripui, below Juncalito on the coast, was a very nice spot for us. A gentleman came out and showed us the various sites we could use, offered to run his own extension cords and hoses, told us to use the beautiful pool, wifi in the restaurant. $12US/night.

 

We stayed two nights, taking a day trip to a vast beautiful deserted beach, Punta Arenas, beachcombing.

We bypassed the city of Loreto and made for a dry-camping (i.e. no facilities) beach on Bahia de Concepcion. This meant climbing back into the mountains to probably 2,500 feet and down again to the coast. Following Mark, high in the mountains, I began to wonder about the strange shadow I was seeing under his right rear tire. I got closer and realized it was dangerously, almost completely, flat. I flashed my lights as he realized at the same moment that his steering was getting awfully squishy on some of those tight mountain curves. It could have a tragedy had it blown suddenly. He made it to the bottom of a hill, still high in the mountains. There was a serious gash in the tread of the tire. These are heavy duty tires he has, 34 inches high and 14 inches wide, costing $450 Canadian apiece. He used one of those tire repair kits with the needle and the sticky strip of rubber and, miraculously, it stopped the leak. Unfortunately between the two of us he couldn’t get more than 40 pounds of pressure in the tire before  his cheesy bike pump started revolting. But the tire held the twenty miles it took us to get to Santispac beach.

Santispac is the most desirable of the string of beaches along Concepcion Bay. The mountains behind shade some of the other beaches hours before they cast shadows on Santispac. We had stayed at Coyote Beach, a few miles down the Bay, on our way down and loved it but Santispac is everyone’s first choice—a beautiful cove, two restaurants, water that is shallow for a good ways out and warms during the day. We took Mark’s boat out several times, fishing or cruising. I climbed the mountain behind the beach. Tough climbing these hills; you really can’t use your hands because every plant that you might want to grab is bound to be full of thorns or spikes or needles, and the handholds between rocks might contain black widow spiders. It is slow, strenuous going; worth the effort for me.

Took Mark’s tire to the llanteria a few miles down the road. (Baja roads are lined with discarded tires and small tire repair places.) These guys removed the tire, patched it from inside, had it ready in an hour, charged 400 pesos ($20),  while Mark and I went into Mulege for supplies (read beer.)

Stayed four nights in Santispac. Brenda developed a relationship with a chihauhua named Lucy

and befriended a 5 year old French Canadian girl named Flora. I tried to wash my hair in the bay using biodegradable soap that Mark had. I thought it was trick soap because it wouldn’t lather and it coated my hair with some wax-like substance. I looked like Albert Einstein on a bad hair day. I learned later that ordinary soap is animal-derived and based on sodium chloride which undergoes changes in the presence of salt water none of which  enhance the properties expected of soap. What you need in saltwater is “sailors’ soap” which is plant-derived and based on potassium chloride.

Mark and Val had some Ontario neighbors that were supposed to have met them in Mexico weeks ago but were delayed by the harsh winter in the north and some other issues. They finally arrived in Santispac, nice couple named Jeff and Wilma. The Ontarians plan on taking the ferry from Santa Rosalia to mainland Mexico, which shaves about 600 miles off their trip east and spares them the bad roads we know are ahead.  We all hung out for a couple of days then it was time for Brenda and I to go off on our own. Between Alan and Betsi and Mark and Valerie we have been traveling with partners for almost our entire stay. Being on our own suddenly makes me feel a little vulnerable, but we are old Mexico hands now and, and for a the next week or so, traveling ground we have already been over.

 

January 27 to February 11, 2017—Land’s End

Todos Santos (All Saints)

From La Paz we crossed back to the Pacific, to Todos Santos (TS). TS is the northern edge of the   heavily-touristed region of southern Baja that reaches north from Cabos San Lucas. It is day trip distance from Cabo so a lot of people who have flown into Cabo take tour buses to TS to see “the real Mexico” and a whole industry has sprung up to simulate the real Mexico. It is nice enough—some touristy shops but a greater number of fine art and craft shops selling silver, pottery, Oaxacan blankets. There are a lot of restaurants, a few nice hotels. The prices were higher than any place we had visited, and the shopkeepers did not negotiate.

We were lucky to get two spots at the only RV park, El Litro, a dusty lot at end of a dirt road on the edge of town, some palms providing shade. Most of the spaces were taken up with long-term residents. The owner, an American named Sylvia, and several of the residents I talked to, had been there thirty years.

Mexican towns are filled with dogs, and they are overwhelmingly good-looking mutts, well-fed and well-behaved. The dogs of Todos Santos were more aggressive and threatening. Our friends Alan and Betsi have a lovable old golden lab, a service dog that doesn’t have an aggressive gene in its body. It was harassed and nipped on several occasions by the local mongrels on the occasions when we took her into town. The dust, the dogs, the Cabo gringos—we hadn’t found the place where we could hole up for an extended period.

Took a couple of trips to the beach nearby, Punta Lobos. We saw whales spouting offshore, and rays jumping clear out of the  water near shore. The fishing fleet is here, about twenty pangas on the beach. Tourists come here for whale-watching and fishing tours. When the boats return from these trips the operators idle offshore about thirty yards and read the rhythms of the waves. When the timing is right they go full-throttle and drive the boats straight into the shore, hurtling about thirty feet onto the sand, props spinning. We watched them fillet the mackerel and bonito they had caught.

I got a glimpse of the phenomenon called “green flash” that I has interested me all these years. In the tropics (the Tropic of Cancer runs just north of TS), in the moment when the last of the sun disappears into the sea, observers report seeing the sky flash green for microsecond. What I saw was the tiny arc of the disappearing sun turn a distinct green color just before dipping into the ocean.

Since we were so close to the bottom of the peninsula we decided we might as well see things through to the bottom of the peninsula so left Todos Santos after a couple nights and went to Cabo San Lucas. It is bustling with local life and lots of visitors who fly into the nearby airport. Beaches lined with all-inclusive, barricaded hotels, and with vendors of everything–blankets, massages, jetskis, sensemilla, blankets, hats, Cuban cigars, everything “almost free today, senor.” We rented space from a peculiar Dutchman, given to odd comments that I think he thought were funny. I would have liked to have heard his story but we walked the beaches all day, went into town for an overpriced dinner, didn’t see any celebrities, and left the next morning.

Drove across the peninsula again and up the Gulf coast for an hour to Martin Verdugo’s Hotel and RV Resort in Los Barriles, and here we have remained for twelve days. It has been nice to sit in one place for a while. Mark and Valerie had arrived a few days before us so we were all together again. Alan had a high school friend who built a house in Barriles to spend the winters in. It is one of the best-designed homes I’ve ever been in; not a mansion but perfectly thought-out and high quality construction by a local architect and her husband, a contractor.

Los Barriles attracts kite-boarders and sail-boarders from all over the world. When the wind kicks up to fifteen knots or more they swarm the gulf for miles of coast here. When the wind dies down for a few days they race off to find it. Amazing aerealists, these guys, launching off waves to hang twenty or thirty feet in the air, cutting through the surf at 30 mph. Some of the kite-boards have hydrofoils underneath that allow the board to rise up a few feet out of the water and avoid the bounce of the waves so the operator is just gliding along smoothly like an ice skater.

This is also a world class fishing destination—marlin and all other bill-fish, tuna, dorado, rooster fish. The high season is the spring and early summer, but there is still a lot of fishing activity here. Mobula Rays jump out of the near shore water here, with regularity, propelling themselves several feet into the air and bellyflopping loudly, for reasons not understood.

Apparently Los Barriles (“the Barrels,” for reasons I haven’t been able to discover; I did see many barrel cactus here which I had not seen elsewhere in Baja) has exploded in popularity with gringos over just the past few decades. Several RV parks accommodating 60+ rigs each,  many hotels, and a lot of property going into north American hands. (Property laws in Mexico for the most part forbid actual ownership by non-Mexicans. People here wind up getting lifetime leases. They can only realize equity by selling the lease or becoming renters but they never actually own title to the property.) A lot of this growth has been fueled by the wind sports.

We liked it because it was relatively cheap at $22/night for water and electricity and sewer connection, had hot showers, free but sketchy wi-fi, lots of dining options, and occasional musical entertainment at local establishments. I played harmonica backup for a couple of performers at the open mic held at Fogota restaurant on Thursdays. There is also a palapa covered, twelve-seat open bar on the beach in front of Verdugo’s park, open from 4 to 8, serving potent and delicious margaritas, run by an enterprising young fellow named Rodrigo who must squeeze a couple hundred limes every evening.

Brenda has walked miles of the beach in both directions. I hiked up the little “mountain” overlooking the town a couple times. We can walk ride bikes to everything in town which has about a half mile of main street with shops and markets and bars and restaurants. Took a couple day trips to see the area and one excursion visiting the veterinarians in neighboring villages until we finally found one that we think has cured Soulie’s ear problem.

Otherwise we have just been lounging, meeting up with our travel companions at the bar in the evening or at a restaurant, or taking turns hosting dinners. Mark is perfecting his recipe for a Baja specialty called La Coquetiel—served in a parfait glass it is a cold, tomato –based concoction like gazpacho, containing chopped vegetables and an assortment of cold cooked seafood, and lime juice.

The water is a little too cold for everyone except me to swim in. It is clear to ten feet and full of life; falls off to deep very quickly and has a strong tidal pull.

Barriles has the most treacherous streets and sidewalks. The curbs are cliffs, sometimes a foot and a half high. The sidewalks slope off sharply into the street at odd intervals. There are often barbwire fences running along the sidewalk. There are open utlity connections everywhere–some you could put both hands in, some you could drop a TV into. Brenda took a spill on one of the slopes that interrupt the sidewalk, sliding on the sand that had accumulated there. Got skinned knees and a skinned elbow. Could have been worse, even deadly, if a car had been coming.

We finish up our stay in Barriles tomorrow. Alan and Betsi left three days ago heading back to California. Mark and Valerie left three nights ago also to check out more remote beaches but returned her to Verdugo’s just an hour or so ago. Tomorrow we caravan with them inland a little ways into the mountains for a couple nights before starting a slow return to the states, taking maybe three weeks to cover 800 miles.

January 14 to January 26, 2017—Loreto to La Paz (with addendum to previous entry)

I neglected to account for a day in our trip from Guerrero Negro to Mulege. We stayed at a beach campground outside Santa Rosalia. It was typical of many campos to be found along the coasts—set up right on the beach, no water or electricity, an outhouse; somebody who might or might not be entitled to do so comes around each day to collect the five or ten dollar (American) fee. This camp, the name of which escapes me, also had a cantina that served food and beverages, and had wifi. There were about fifty sites, less than half occupied. The residents were older folks (older than me that is) who had been wintering in this location for decades. They all knew each other. Most were from northwest US or Canada.

Early in the morning Alan and I talked to a guy, who had been out fishing since dawn, as he was bringing his boat to shore. He told us about the fishing and his history with the place. He noted that every year one or more of the old-timers passes on and, surprisingly to me, there were no new people moving in; none pursuing the beach-camping life for several months during the winter. I don’t know what has changed. He didn’t know what had changed. In any event this guy was knowing and friendly, but as we were preparing to leave the camp an hour or so later he came over to Brenda and started a spiel that went “People like to have mementos of their travels and with that in mind I’d like  to offer this book of poems of my own to you. Some people are put off by poetry because they don’t understand it but I think you will find my work quite accessible.  Let me read you one,” and he  proceeded to read some iambic pentameter doggerel about Mexican children and sunsets, simple-minded stuff. It was accessible alright, but not at his asking price. I offered to trade him an unused Potomac Riverkeeper hat but he said, “No the price is thirteen dollars.” I’m behind his back signaling to Brenda, “Ixnay on the ookbay!” She offers ten, I might have sprung for five for the amusement value, but he sticks to his $13 price. Sorry Amigo, no vende. Hustling old codger, maybe he’s the reason gringos stopped coming to Mexico.

Baja Sur is desert cut through with high mountainous remains of volcanic origin veering from coast to coast, and cordon cactus the largest in the world, and crystal waters on the Sea of Cortez side and the wild Pacific on the other. In between is vast areas of untrammeled, scrubby land broken up with the occasional small town or village. Some, like Mulege or San Ignacio, are palm tree oases beside perennial rivers. Others pop up in the most inhospitable of areas, compact collections of ramshackle shanties that could be in Soweto or Kingstown, or cute little towns of adobe painted bright and planted around with flowers. On long stretches of fifty miles or more there will be a few roadside tiendas or taquerias, little wooden shacks or one room adobe buildings selling a few comestibles and beer. There are maybe a dozen cities, excluding the border towns, that number more than a couple thousand residents

During the monsoon season, September, the rivers flood and destroy whole villages. In 2009 a flood wiped out a swath of houses three deep along the river in Mulege, along with road infrastructure and bridges, a disaster from which they are still recovering. Historically, the capital of Baja California has been relocated from cities destroyed by rainstorms. The high mountains receive more regular rainfall which seeps through the porous volcanic rock and emerges in intermittent streams that support small homesteads seen off the road marked by windmills. In the central plains of the south there is more abundant water near the surface and row crops like corn and chickpeas are grown. But tourism and fishing are the prime income sources for the Baja peninsula, with a few cities supporting some mining operations.

It is a dusty place. The residents of the cities and shanty towns are constantly sweeping the few paved streets and sidewalks. All over Mexico, every third building is in a state of being under construction or under demolition, it is hard to tell which. There are building lots everywhere with walls of structures, two or three or even four walls, some chest-high, some ready for a roof, and it is obvious that they have been in this state for many years. Perhaps these are markers of the 2008 financial crisis in Mexico. Or perhaps they are being built slowly as resources become available. Somone told me that a building in Mexico isn’t subject to taxation until it is finished so there is motivation to leave your house unfinished.

Loreto

Loreto is a decent-sized city of some 20,000. In the mid 18^th century it was the largest city in the western coast of the Northern hemisphere. In 1750 there was no place with more inhabitants from Alaska to the equator on the Pacific coast. It was the home base of the Spanish Christian missionaries who went inland to San Javier to build what is now the oldest European church in western part of the northern Hemisphere (1749) and which we visited by driving, sans trailer, over a 5,000 ft mountain range for a day trip.

They went up the west coast establishing missions as far north as San Francisco. Junipero Serra started from Loreto. First the Jesuits, then the Dominicans, then the Franciscans. Just as in the US, many of the native tribes died from disease or outright murder shortly after the arrival of the Europeans.

We moved into the RV camp within the city of Loreto, and were soon joined by Mark and Valerie who had been dry-camping on the coast while we were in Mulege.

Over these few nights several restaurants were sampled, I tried unsuccessfully to obtain cash advances on my bank card, a problem that had surfaced in Mulege and was starting to become a worry, and too much tequila was consumed by Mark and I. Brenda and Betsi hit all the little shops along the malecon and around the old town square.

We met a Canadian who played the pennywhistle and he and Brenda met up in the camp patio in the evening to play some songs. They played a few songs, drew a small appreciative crowd, played a few songs more and fun was being had, until some recently-arrived camper complained about the loudness. It was 9:30 in the evening. The musicians obliged and the party broke up. At 6:00 am the next morning the cross fit gym started up with superloud headbanging music and the complainer, according to a witness, “packed up and left in the time it took for me to take a piss.”

There is a nice new hotel and a nice new waterfront promenade in Loreto, constructed recently by the government.

Actually, a few of the Sea-side towns have similar construction projects and similar appearance and Alan hipped me to the fact that a previous government had invested a bundle in these Sea-side projects with the idea that they would draw in the yacht-cruising set. The problem for the government was that yacht cruisers aren’t inclined to pay American prices for hotel rooms and mooring spaces when they can anchor offshore for nothing. The hotel in Loreto probably had two hundred rooms and, at the time we were there, exactly two renters. And the story is the same in La Paz and other locations. The public works project was a bust and in fact may have been a pork project all along.

Loreto is clean, friendly, with lots of good services. It is also noisy (heavy metal music started early and ended late at the nearby CrossFit gym; dogs barking; roosters crowing) and after a couple of nights Brenda and I headed back to the Pacific coast with Alan and Betsi while Mark and Valerie continued on down the Gulf coast.

Puerto San Carlos

A three hour+ drive from Loreto, over the mountains to the Pacific, Puerto San Carlos is on Magdalena Bay, a large protected cove famous for whale watching. We got in late and it was extremely windy, gale-force. We pulled onto the beach behind a hotel/restaurant, asked around, and a guy said we could stay there for $10 american (he was the only guy so far smart enough to quote prices in US dollars. When we arrived in Mexico one US dollar was buying 19 pesos; by the time we got to this place a US dollar was worth 22 pesos—a ten percent increase in value over three weeks.)

We arranged for a whale watching excursion the next morning, $150 total for four of us, for 3 hours, in a panga which is the universal work boat of the Mexicans on both coasts. Boston whaler-sized, high jutting prows, open, fiberglass, powered by anything the seamen can get their hands on. The fishermen beat the daylights out of these boats busting through the chop at high speed. You hear them in the morning in every seaside town—Bam! Bam! Bam!—racing out to sea. We had a margarita in the restaurant and were asleep by 8pm, worn out by driving. The next day was too windy for whale watching so we skedaddled back to the Sea of Cortez to

La Paz

La Paz is the capital of Baja California Sur (Baja Sur being the southern half of the peninsula. In the 1500’s Spanish and Portuguese sailors, who had explored the opening of the Sea of Cortez, thought that the whole Pacific coast of what we now call California was one big island extending from what we now call Cabo San Lucas to god-knows-where.) La Paz is a city of 200,000 residents. We took a spot in an RV park outside of town called Maranatha. It was a large operation with event and dormitory spaces, a pool that the cool weather did not make inviting. We were in a very spacious site near the highway. Made friends with Jeff and Sonya from Washington State, next door to us in a Class A (i.e. bus-sized) RV. Stayed two nights, went into town, shopped at the WalMart, took Soulie to a vet. We were concerned that she had been bothering her eyes and ears with rubbing, but the problem appears to be more serious. She has been eating well throughout the trip but has lost over two pounds. Her protein levels are on the low edge of normal. We made two visits to the vet and he gave her antibiotics the name of another doctor to follow up with in Los Barriles in ten days.

We left the rv camp and went to a free beachfront site twenty miles away, Playa Tecolote. Severe winds and crashing surf. A few hours after we set up camp a group of kiteboarders arrived and proceeded to execute worldclass kite surfing maneuvers right in front of us, twenty of them executing the most acrobatic and high-speed antics. During the night the surf broke over the beachhead and flowed into the campsites. The dirt trail we had come in on was a nascent river.

We managed to find our way out and decided to escape the wind by crossing back to the Pacific Ocean again, which at this point on the peninsula was only an hour away.

 

January 14 to January 20, 2017—beaches; desert; ; kamikaze drivers; roads curving along the base of, or over, mountains by the sea

Guererro Negro

 

Guerrero Negro is on the Pacific. It is a one industry town, the industry being salt making. It is a fairly large burg of 10,000 people surrounded by 100,000 acres of salt evaporation ponds. We arrived at Malarrimo RV park and shouldered our way into the crowded lot in the dark, in the rain. The establishment consisted of a very nice, linen tablecloth restaurant in a dirt parking lot surrounded by about thirty extended parking spaces which were the campsites, a three room building containing two crummy showers and one crummier toilet, the whole surrounded by a ten foot cinder block wall painted white. The next morning, after a night of heavy rain, there was a lake in front of the restaurant that stayed for two days despite attempts to snake out the drain and an open sewer in front of the bath house.

The main street of the town had several intersections flooded to a depth of a foot. Drivers delighted in plowing through at full speed and throwing water onto other cars, pedestrians, storefronts. The back side of the town was a warren of dirt roads lined with hovels; two bars and ten stray dogs per block.

Our site cost the equivalent of ten bucks a night and the restaurant and bar were really very good and equally inexpensive.

Coming out of the restaurant the first night we ran into Mark and Valerie, our Canadian friends who parted from us a week before and five hundred miles ago in San Felipe in their monster diesel truck while we were caught in the gas crisis.

Alan was not confidant that he could communicate his welding needs to the local craftsman and decided his repairs could wait a little longer. We all took a drive out to a nearby lagoon to see if the whales had started arriving yet but the dirt road to the beach, wending through the salt flats, got narrower and messier with each kilometer so I decided to make a five-point turn while I still had the room. We later learned that the whales, gray whales, had not yet arrived to mate and spawn in the lagoons around Guerrero Negro.

 

Whaling is a big part of Baja history but even more so in this town. The restaurant was filled with artifacts and memorabilia of the whaling scene of the 19^th century.

Hung around for two nights and headed back to the Gulf Coast in a three vehicle caravan that we have maintained for a week now.

The roads here have been overall good. For long stretches of Highway 1 there is no shoulder and the road is built on the top of a ridge, so any momentary inattention that causes a wheel to go off the road would send you down a precipice. Occasionally there is a major flaw in the pavement, and we have had to brake for herds of goats or wandering cattle. A surprising number of drivers are suicidal. If I were to tell you of their stunts (passing at high speed on a blind curve or approaching the crest of a hill–cars, gas trucks, commercial buses) you would accuse me of exaggerating. These guys have great faith in their deity or a great desire to meet him.

Stopped for lunch in Santa Rosalia, a town established by a French copper mining concern in the 1800s. The hulking rusted machinery of the enterprise remain where the French left them when they were expelled during the Mexican revolution, the success of which is celebrated each year as cinque de maio. The buildings are wooden frame buildings, unlike the adobe and brick of the rest of Baja, and the has a European feel. The town church was designed by Gustave Eiffel and shipped from France, and there remains a French bakery in town.

Mulege

Mulege was our destination and we reached it late afternoon. It is celebrated in Baja history as the site of a successful repulse of an American force, led by Winfield Scott, in the Mexican American War. It wasn’t much of a battle but being one of the only successes of the Mexican army in that conflict it is a source of pride.

It is an idyllic, oasis town. A healthy river nourishes the date palms that cover the town. Dates were harvested here for export into the 1970s but the dates are inferior to majoul dates from the middle east and the harvest is no longer worthwhile. We stayed three nights in a camp in the center of the town (population 3,000) and enjoyed the ambience, the friendly people, the delicious food. There is a museum of sorts in the old prison, a large fortress overlooking the town on a hill. It was in use into the 1970s, always a low security facility where prisoners, men and women, were let out during the day to work and called back to the prison in the evening by the blowing of a conch shell horn. A nearby mission is worth visiting also, an imposing 18^th century structure of locally-fabricated concrete and stone with walls four feet thick. We had our laundry done in town overnight, two Ikea-bags full for fifteen dollars, washed and folded. Alan got his frame welded with the help of a translator.

We ate at Dany’s taco stand every night. It doesn’t make sense to cook in mexico when a full meal can be had for four dollars.

Coyote

We drove down the coast an hour to Coyote Beach on the Bay of Concepcion. Parked feet from the shore, blue-green clear water, porpoises and whale sharks offshore. No electricity or water, $5/night; vendors come by every few minutes selling peeled fresh shrimp $7/pound, blankets from Oaxaca, pastries, laundry services, etc etc. A nice cantina a mile away with an acoustic duo playing and singing sweet Spanish melodies.

Alan and I climbed a good ways up the hill behind the camp, an arduous and probably unwise adventure but we escaped major injury and felt proud. Mark inflated his thirteen foot boat and caught a bunch of fish for dinner including a 24 inch snapper and several foot-long trigger fish.

Then he took Brenda and Betsie out to the islands that dot the bay and have pristine white sand beaches hidden in coves. And they also went to the hot springs that bubble up into the gulf alongside the cliffs. Frigate birds. Vermillion flycatchers.

[View of Coyote Bay about halfway up the mountain I climbed.]

And bioluminescence. I noticed the beach at night was silver bright like mercury when it hit the shore ten feet in front of us. Then someone down the beach shrieked and we saw that wherever the water was disturbed, by hand or by the movement of feet, it glowed brightly with the light of countless jewel-like particles. Freaking amazing.

Mark, Alan and I went out fishing and cruising the islands on the third day. Mark decided it was too much effort to deflate and reinflate his boat so we spent the morning figuring out a way to attach it to his camper. When we got it lashed on we headed south, past a friendly military checkpoint, destination: Loreto.

January 7 to January 14, 2017—San Felipe, San Luis Gonzalez, Guerrero Negro

 

Passed through two federal checkpoints en route to the west coast of the Gulf of California. They are looking for people smuggling guns from US, among other things. They are intimidating—a half dozen guys in fatigues, some with their faces covered, some with automatic weapons. At the first stop they held us maybe five minutes, going into the Scamp and poking around. The next checkpoint was more relaxed and the found something amusing about the Scamp. I think I heard the Spanish word for “egg” being bandied about.

Route 2 runs around the head of the bay, most of it within twenty miles of the US border, I think. After rounding the head of the Bay and heading south we came into a small town, the name of which I missed. I wanted to get gas but didn’t recognize that the line of cars up the block were queued up for gas. I had to circle through the town and found another Pemex station with a shorter line. The attendant “forgot” to clear the previous purchase from the pump until I moved my eyes back and forth from him to the pump. He cleared the counter and pumped half a tank. This proved to be a timely purchase; if I hadn’t stopped I would have arrived in San Felipe (SF) near empty at the start of the gas crisis.

We took a spot at in SF at Club de Pesca on the edge of town, within walking distance. Thirty dollars American per night, at a spot on the beach with a concrete patio and a palapa, a palm-covered area to sit, dine.

 

 

Within a few minutes of our arriving another couple arrived in a Itasca, a camper mounted on a dual-wheel Toyota frame. They were from California, Alan and Betsi, and we have become fast friends. Betsi and Brenda have opinions and preferences (hot showers) in common, Alan and I tend to see the world in the same light. On the other side of us were Mark and Valerie from Ontario where he has some kind of marine salvage business. He has a heavy truck rig, a monster pick up with a Cummins engine, with a camper, a sixteen foot inflatable boat, and all kinds of gear for off-roading. Mark is a big dude whose friends call him Shrek and between the three sites we had a cool little scene going.

President Nieto of Mexico had proclaimed that he was going to end the subsidization of the price of gas in the country and let it rise to market levels. The first installment of his plan went into effect while we were entering Mexico. Overnight the price of gas went up 20%. The price of a gallon of gas was now equivalent to a day’s earnings under Mexico’s minimum wage. The populace was furious as there were simultaneous raises in the price of electricity. Protestors, like the ones we had seen in Sonoyta, were blocking access to stations. Some stations in the more radical states of Mexico were looted, some were torched. More significantly for us, protestors in the border town of Mexicali took over the Pemex transport depots and blocked shipments of gas into the state of Baja. (For a time they even took over the immigration checkpoint and waved everybody through). The upshot is that there was no gas in San Felipe for almost a week. None. Incredibly, there was no official statement on the situation. None. There was only rumor, in person or on the internet. For five successive days every Mexican I asked about gas said, “Maybe tonight, definitely tomorrow.” Manana, in other words.

But being stuck in San Felipe is not a bad thing. We could walk into town for shrimp or fish tacos at $1 apiece (the fish taco was supposedly invented in SF). We could buy a six pack of Tecate at the camp store for $4. We had good company and a fabulous setting on the beach, mid to upper 60s everyday. Things we so cheap it didn’t make sense to cook but go to restaurants for every meal. In the evening the local troubadour Guillermo found us and serenaded us with his lovely baritone and his banged-up, bittersweet-sounding nylon-stringed guitar. There were very few other tourists in town so I really think he looked around town to seek us out, such appreciative listeners and good tippers.

 

 

[I always cut the heads off dieties in pictures.]

The beach at SF was like the Bay of Fundy in that the geography of the sea floor and the height of the tides cause the sea to recede a great distance at low tide and come almost to our palapa at high tide. Sightings here of seals, dolphins, fishing boats (until they ran out of gas) and the frequent appearance of a Mexican navy gun ship(enforcing a net-fishing ban on the San Filipeans because they almost devastated the vaquetos porpoise with their carelessness).

 

I had half-a-tank of gas, not enough to make a run for the border or try to make the next town south with great confidence. Shrek made a run for it south on Wednesday because he had a healthy supply of diesel and is an adventurous sort. He was to report back on fuel conditions as he went but for reasons I now understand I got no reports (no telephone or internet connection.) Gas returned to SF on Friday and we caravanned south with Alan and Betsi.

Bahia de San Luis Gonzaga

We drove south three hours through the desolate, beautiful desert and then the beautiful, scary mountains. We missed our turn for Papa Fernandez’s campo and passed through a military checkpoint with no hassle, then realized our mistake and doubled back through the military checkpoint again. They were cool.

Papa Fernandez’s son, I’m guessing, took our money and gestured over the hill to the beach. He looked at my Maryland license plate and said “mucho camino.” Took me a minute to comprehend. “yes, a lot of road.”

Over the hill we found palapas right on the beach, at the base of a high hill, no electricity or water, $15/night. We were the only campers on the whole cove.

We explored around the next day (the weird eroded cliff caves where Brenda heard singing, the beachfront filled with beautiful rounded stones in three colors and shop-quality seashells) then headed out. I couldn’t get traction over the hill going back and made a barely-controlled slide backward about twenty feet. Back on the beach after a few scary minutes I found a less steep approach. We crossed back through the military checkpoint with the same guards who just waved us through like old amigos.

We drove about 90 miles south, stopping at a roadside shack for fish tacos, and at the little town of Puertocitos for gas.

Then we drove the roughest 26 miles of road I’ve ever been on. Our guidebook was dated 2012 and said that the highway south should be completed in a couple of years. Well, it ain’t. This was bone-and-kidney-jarring camino of washboarded sand and big rocks embedded in the road. You could not take your eyes of the road right in front of you except to check how close you might be to the edge of the cliff face or if another driver was approaching fast from behind or approaching in a cloud of dust from ahead. After an hour I was exhausted. After another hour the cats were acting sick and Brenda was cursing. A little while later Alan broke some welds on his truck frame causing the carrier that was attached on the back and his bumper to bounce too much and too low. We transferred the weight (water and gas cans) to my carrier and motored on. We made it to the highway and decided to go to Guerrero Negro, a larger town that might have services he needed, rather than the picturesque but otherwise barren town of Bahia de Los Angeles. We arrived after dark and are here now, in Malarrimo RV park, about which anon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

January 3 to January 7–Old Mexico

Crossed the border at Lukeville AZ into Sonoyta, Sonora, Mexico without incident. In fact we didn’t even stop—there was no one to give us the order to stop on the Mexican side of the border. I assumed the border check station would be further on but it never appeared. The border station turned out to be hidden away right at the crossing gate; not spotting it at this time wound up costing us half a day of driving.

I crept along at the posted speed limit through the dusty and busy main street. One minute after arriving in Mexico a guy in a banged-up pickup passed us on the right at five times my speed, kicking up a cloud of dust and scattering pedestrians.

In the previous days the federal government raised the tax on gasoline, increasing the price by 25%. The common folk were enraged. In Sonoyta we saw groups of cars and trucks with anti-government messages written on their windows in soap gathered around the Pemex stations (the national gas company Pemex is the only vendor of gas). When we returned to Sonoyta two days later there were balaklava-clad soldiers armed with automatic weapons in armored vehicles throughout town. The protestors had tried to block access to the Pemex stations by circling the wagons. In other cities Pemex stations were torched.

We drove ninety minutes to the east coast of Gulf of California, Puerto Penasco (a.k.a. Rocky Point, aka The Arizona Riviera.) We chose the RV park on the outskirts of town, the Reef, which proved to be a good choice. The in-town camps were crowded, noisy, surrounded by concertina-wire-topped fences we later learned. It was very nice, right on the beach, uncrowded, quiet, a bar, a restaurant, and a store on premises.

Vendors came along the beach peddling gaudy wares. Small fishing boats worked the water in front of our campsite. We went into town several times. At the farmacia by the railroad tracks the lady filled my prescriptions from the containers I presented or the names I had written down. No scripts to show (no English spoken) and it cost me a few dollars less than refilling at the Leonardtown CVS.

There are 20 pesos to the dollar. Seems weird, of course, to be peeling off 500 peso notes to buy less than 100 dollars of groceries. And things are inexpensive in Mexico. A pound and a half of some of the best shrimp I’ve ever eaten, peeled and deveined, for $8. Six pack of Tecate for $4. Fish tacos and corn/cheese/poblano pepper tamales for a buck apiece. (Altho I am still dreading that  yesterday’s tamale will turn on me.)

Mexican cities are a carnival. Everyone is outside, colorful decorations everywhere, hand painted signs for the endless number of little shops on the malacon, each store blaring some manic Mexican music that my son memorably described as sounding like “music from a circus on the moon.” Guys walking around selling cotton candy on tall sticks, traffic and pedestrians darting around in the most disorderly fashion, laughter and shouting and car horns.

The back streets show the direst poverty—ramshackle shanties, dirt streets, flooded intersections, unowned dogs always in sight. And in these residential streets the same mad music and colorful decorations.

There were gunshots in the desert outside our campsite one night but I’ve heard lots worse in New York and Baltimore. The seaside geology eluded me—slabs of gray and pink granite next to friable slabs of concretized fossils of marine life (volcanic tuff?), feet thick, then a stretch of what appears to be hardened lava. A couple of small hills along the shore, mostly covered in sand, and a scrubby desert behind us stretching to the distance.

We needed a tourist visa which I had intended to get in Sonoyta at the border station which I never spotted. I assumed we could get one in Puerto Penasco but that turned out not to be the case. I left a message at the airport office thinking they must issue them there but after two days and no reply we had to drive the 90 minutes back to Sonoyta. After some searching around we found the proper office and got our documents. When I got back to Penasco the airport responded that, yes, they could issue tourist visas.

After four nights here, on a Friday, the ugly americans started showing up, with 4-wheelers, booze, loud music. Despite the prominent signs saying the Mexican Dept of the Environment had put the area under a burn ban they started up fires along the beach. Fireworks were bound to come on Saturday so we hitched up and drove from Puerto Penasco  5 hours around the Gulf of California to a point directly west, San Felipe, Baja California.

 

 

December 27 to January 3, 2016­/2017—Adios New, Hola Old, Mexico-wise

 

Left Albuquerque with reluctance. Reluctantly, because, after all, our grandkids were there. Not only that, Tom had a world class collection of wines and liquors (he still has the collection; just smaller quantities of each), the pantry was full of delicacies, and we had our own separate quarters in a stand-alone house in Hillary’s yard. These structures are known as casitas in New Mexico which translates as “a place to put the old folks until we need it as a party space for New Year’s Eve.” Just joking; it was time for us to get on the road. We were not moving around enough.

 

I had a guy working on the Scamp during the month we were in ABQ. I didn’t get an estimate as he came recommended by a neighbor of Hillary’s who I know and like; I just told the RV guy what I wanted done. As the day of reckoning drew near I began to worry about just what he might charge for the minor but numerous repairs. Anything under $800 would make me pleased, but I could imagine him charging as much as $1,500. The total freight was $792, so I started the year on an $8 high.

Drove a little ways south to Elephant Butte State Park in New Mexico (NM). A beautiful place, $14/night, spacious well-appointed campsites like all of the NM state parks we have visited. The park, which is not called Elephant Butt, is the largest in NM, built around a 40 mile long reservoir. The reservoir is created by a dam on the Rio Grande built in the 1930s by Civilian Conservation Corps. On one hike we found what must have been their camp dumpsite—a patch of desert about half mile from the dam, off road, strewn with ancient browned tin cans that had been opened with those knife blades that chew a can open one bite at a time.

Truth or Consequences NM is the town nearest Elephant Butt park. It adopted the name after a dare by the TV show of that name. Previously known as Geronimo Springs, the town has numerous spas built around the hot springs which bubble to the surface here. Like so many small towns throughout the country half the storefronts are vacant and a small group is trying to make a go of it by offering “artisanal,” exotic or hipster goods. We wish them luck everywhere. If they prosper there will be a multitude of cool towns to dawdle in. TorC has a decent if rather scattershot collection of artifacts in their museum; worth an hour of time and the admission charge. It’s all railroads, mining, fabled gunslingers, Indians, and whorehouses in this part of the world.

Met a fellow resident in the RV park who grew up in Chicago and, as a kid, carried the great Hubert Sumlin’s amplifier to a gig. Later he played brush drums for folk records made at Chess Studios, went to San Francisco in the summer of love, then became a musician in his own right as drummer for a band called Daddy Long Legs which found success in England in the 1960s-early 70s. He made me copies of their first two albums, which according to the interwebs are desired by vinyl collectors. Stylistically they are all over the lot but it is professional, solid musicianship. He was a nice guy who told me lots of stories about the blues and rock musicians he knew. He told me Sam Leigh couldn’t tour with the Butterfield Blues Band because the pistol he kept in his waistband discharged accidentally and shot off his left testicle.

 

It got pretty cold at night in Elephant Butt, but Zach had bought us a small electric heater for Christmas which worked silently and effectively. A great quality-of-life improver. Elephant Butte Lake State Park is grand.

We moved further south in NM in search of warmth, to a state park within sight of the Mexico border in Columbus NM. This was the site of the last armed incursion by a foreign army into US territory. Pancho Villa raided the town of Columbus in 1916 and scores of people were killed in a fierce battle before Villa was repulsed. General “Blackjack” Pershing was dispatched with an army to track Villa into Mexico but was recalled after nine months. Villa had at one time received US support for his revolution but Pres. Wilson withdrew that support. Later Villa accepted arms from Germany who sought to complicate the US military posture at the outset of WWI but Pancho’s revolutionary movement collapsed and he retired to his home state of Chihahua and lived as a wealthy landowner before being assassinated in 1923. There is a museum at Pancho Villa State Park where I learned all this. New Mexico has very nice state parks but this one was rainy and cold so after a breakfast at Irma’s we headed west.

 

Bisbee, Arizona

Bisbee, AZ, site of one of the great copper mines and a tourist attraction. We took a spot at the Queen Mine state park right in town. Toured the Queen Mine, a one hour foray into the adjoining mountain on a miner’s cart, the tour led by an experienced miner.

The Queen Mine operated from 1870 to 1970 and drew 8 billion tons of copper out of the ground, through underground tunnels and then open pit mining. Also 3 million ounces of gold and 30 million of silver. One early owner of the mine lost his one-tenth share wagering, drunkenly, that he could outrun a man on a horse. The RV park only had room for us for one night; the next night was New Year’s Eve and Bisbee is a party town. We went up the road a little ways to Tombstone.

Tombstone, Arizona

Tombstone is completely hokified but fun to visit. Lots of authentic period-looking characters walking around, failed actors for the most part I discovered, strutting and spitting in character and always on the verge of a gunfight. The gunfights start in the dirt street but move into outdoor theater spaces where you are expected to follow and cough up a few shekels. All men walk differently in Tombstone, it’s impossible not to do so. The word “testosterone” is derived from the name Tombstone. When all is said and done there are authentic remnants of the “old west” to be found in the town. Many of the establishments are in the original buildings and the Bird Cage Theater was shuttered in 1930 and the contents left untouched until the late 1950s when it was cracked open like a vault and its elaborate furnishings restored with a light touch.

It was New Year’s Eve. Our tradition of recent years has been to retire early on December 31, like all the other 364 days. Brenda upheld the tradition but I went into Tombstone and bought one hundred dollars of chips to enter a Texas Hold’em poker game. Every member of my family across three generations with one exception is an accomplished gambler the exception being me. I have played poker in maybe a dozen friendly nickel-dime games in my life and never in anything approaching a professional game. Tombstone seemed like a good place to try my luck. The game took place in an 18^th century bank building turned holstery (as in a place where leather holsters are made) owned by the dealer, Rico. One professional table and six players, all men older than me. They were mostly Tombstone businessmen including the holsterer, the newspaper editor, the tobacconist, and the guy who ran the RV park we were staying at. Talk was strictly game-related, no idle chitchat. They called me “Maryland” as in “What’s it gonna be, Maryland?” I had only studied the rules of Texas Hold’em on the internet for an hour before the game. They were tolerant of my ignorances and occasional faux pax. After an hour and a half I bought another forty dollars worth of chips to replenish my dwindling supply. Two hours later I had won two big hands and a string of small ones and came out, after 3.5 hours and a $140 buy in, only twelve dollars down. I felt like I had made a decent showing and I had a good time in this period setting in a historic town with nice gents and I made it home well before midnight.

 

Why, Arizona

A long drive after Tombstone, on route 10, crossing below Tucson in a ferocious wind and rain. Turned south after Tucson onto a long, lonely highway that went passed Kitts Peak Observatory.

 

[Not a mesa but a mountain disappearing into a cloud. Geronimo surrended a few miles from here at Skeleton Canyon, ending the Indian Wars. Geronimo kept popping up in our travels, going back to Ft Pickens in Florida where G was imprisoned.]

On this 100 mile stretch we saw maybe 25 vehicles and 20 of them were DHS Border Patrol. We took a spot in Coyote Howls RV park, $20/night with full hookups. Stayed two nights. The camp guy told us how to get through the barbwire fence at the end of the dirt road so we could walk around in the desert. The RV park had thirty spots and most of them were reserved for the winter by Coloradans, British Columbians, northern Arizonans and such. We joined them around the fire at the camp managers site in the evening—drinks and story-swapping. We spent a day in Organ Pipe National Monument, a vast park protecting a representative segment of the Sonoran Desert and the rare organ pipe cactus. Parts of the park are a UN-designated Biosphere Reserve meaning it represents a unique and significant natural ecosystem. It is staggeringly beautiful in places. The Ajo mountain road, 20+ miles of dirt path, was as striking to me as Yosemite. To re-strike a common theme here, it was made remarkable by the fact that we were the only ones in it. The 20-some miles took hours to navigate, not just because the road was rough but because every twenty yards the vistas and scenery changed to something more beautiful. We saw two cars parked at trailheads and no people the whole route.

 

Large parts of the park were closed for eleven years owing to immigration and smuggling activity and the death of a park ranger in a shootout. The closures ended two years ago altho there is still a fair amount of immigration activity in the area. A humanitarian group puts out barrels of water marked by tall purple flags at distant spots in the desert for unprepared travelers. There is a campground at Organ Pipe but without water or electricity. (The organ pipe cactus looks like a set of organ pipes only when it dies and the skeletons of the multi-stemmed cactus are revealed.)

[These are the principle cactus types. Foreground in prickly pear, talls ones saguaro, between them the low one is cholla, and left the organ pipe.]

 

Our original plan was to drive back to Highway Ten, continue on to California, cross into Mexico at Calexico/Mexicali and head straight to Baja.  This would have involved some backtracking but would allow me to refill my meds in US. But here we were only twenty miles from a small border crossing at Lukeville/Sonoyta. We decided to go into Mexico from here in Arizona and find a place en-route to Baja on the east coast of the Gulf of California and hope I could fill my RX in MX. Continue reading “December 27 2016 to January 3, 2017–New M to Old M”

November 22 to December 18, 2016—ABQ

The past month has been taken up with enjoying the company and hospitality of our daughter and her fam in Albuquerque (a.k.a. the Duke City, ABQ, Kerky). Hillary and Tom and our grandkids Clementine and Tavish live in one of the most pleasant neighborhoods (Southeast Heights adjoining Nob Hill). It is known for the strong sense of community evinced here. The neighbors have keys to one another’s homes, are often visiting with one another, and hosting neighborhood street parties a couple of times a year. At Christmas the neighborhood streets, walkways, and parts of the houses are decorated with luminarias, paper bags weighted with sand with a small candle placed inside. (This is a distinctly New Mexico custom, altho in northern New Mexico they are called farolitos.) The folks on Hillary’s street go from house to house on Christmas Eve, enjoying a nosh and a nip at each. So the past weeks have had us enjoying/chasing/chastising the grandkids, the details of which not many would find interesting.

[Then again, who doesn’t want to hear about my grandchildren. This is Tavish in a reflective moment. He has an obsession with buses and we were stopped at a light coming back  from the shop that is working on the Scamp. He saw lots of buses there and even sat in the driver’s seat of a huge motor coach, and that’s what he’s recollecting, I believe.)

[Clem attends a school that, on Fridays, consists of spending the entire day in the bosque along the Rio Grande. It is a great program, some German import called something like ‘Wilderness Kindergarten” –they go out in the woods in all but the most inclement weather, they make up their own play, the adults hang back and only intervene to avert the most extreme injury. I joined in one Friday. Clem, as is her usual during the Bosque trips, elected to take a short nap after lunch and story time, looking like something from an old world fairy tale.]

Another local Holiday tradition practiced in the Nob Hill area is the Sparkle Parade, a nighttime event in which all kinds of vehicles are covered over with increasingly elaborate displays of Christmas lights and paraded down Central Avenue—vintage cars, the volkswagen club, trash trucks, cement trucks, firetrucks, bicyclists, horse brigades. It is an unpretentious, jolly event that gets bigger every year.

Albuquerque is the largest city in NM, with about half the state’s population. The city was founded along the Rio Grande, which is usually shallow and about fifty yards wide here, in 1702 and continues to expand in all directions. The city is in a rift valley at an elevation of 5,000 feet. The Sandia Mountains loom over the city to the east, at 10,000+ feet. Their appearance changes every time you turn around—crowned in clouds that disappear and leave behind snow on the crests that melts in the afternoon, and throughout the day the stone changes from pink to purple to gold to black. A pastel pink is one of the defining colors of the region, the color of the granite that the mountains are composed of and from which the pink-tinged sand is derived. A few miles to the west of the city one sees a seventeen mile long escarpment and, on the mesa above, a string of extinct volcano cones.

The escarpment is a cliff face of basalt produced by the volcanoes. The surface of the basalt gains a patina of black over the millennia, and if you chisel away the black surface a reddish-yellow stone is revealed. The native people’s (Pueblo, mostly) engraved images in the basalt boulders, some recognizable as stylized representations of snakes and lighting and such, some abstract, some seeming to depict alien beings. There are many thousands of these petroglyphs concentrated in a relatively small area and in the 1980s the whole area became Petroglyph National Monument. Within the park are three very nice hikes, two going through the canyons containing the most ‘glyphs, the other going around the base of the cinder cones that remain of the volcanoes. At the park visitor center we watched a short film about the stone symbols advancing several academic and spiritual theories about the meaning of the writing. Surprisingly, to me, no one advanced the idea that it was the work of young graffiti artists; I think I know goofing off when I see it. “Hey, man, this one looks like your mother.”

 

I also took a long uphill hike in the Manzano Mountains, a smaller range south of the Sandias. Tunnel Canyon, Birdhouse Crest, and part of Otero Canyon. There was snow in patches on the higher elevations. Be sure to bring water with you no matter how undemanding the trail might appear; this is parching country.

[Don’t know if there is enough resolution here but this is from the volcano area looking east across the rift valley. Albuquerque is somewhere in the middle distance and the Sandia Peaks in the far distance.]

[Manzano mountains at maybe 7,000 feet looking north to the east side of the Sandias.]

Getting the Scamp and our heads ready for Mexico. Bought the requisite car insurance, decided on a first base camp destination about two hours south of Mexicali, in San Felipe on the Gulf of California. We expect to cross over around January 8. The couple that I mentioned we met in Key Largo, Florida, starting their second year of living in their small Trillium trailer, might caravan with us down the Baja coast. I hope it comes about, comfort in numbers and they are good company, but the idea just emerged and isn’t settled yet.

 

November 12 to November 22, 2016

Lafayette, Louisiana

Route 10 west of New Orleans is one rough road, at least when you’re towing a lightweight Scamp. The road runs through the bayou on pilings and is a long series of low humps that set the whole rig a-vibrating in a bad way. We got an early start and made Lafayette by early afternoon. Brenda decamped with her friend Sheila that she met at Augusta cajun music camp. I consoled myself with dinner at Prejean’s restaurant. The next day the girls took off again for a day of sightseeing and cajun music while I took a long hike in a forest and walked around downtown Lafayette for a while. We would have liked to have stayed longer in cajun country, visiting some other people Brenda knows, going to some jams. Our original plan was to stay for the better part of a week and then go down the coast of Texas to Big Bend before turning north to Albuquerque sometime in early December. But Hillary asked if we could arrive before Thanksgiving to help with the kids because Tom was going east to spend the holiday with his mother and brothers. So we had to pick up the pace to shave more than a week off of our itinerary.

Coastal Texas

We did get a chance to explore some of Gulf-coastal Texas. Sea-Rim State Park south of Port Arthur is a nice park on the shore, but quite out of the way. To get to it you drive through, as in right through the middle of, several large oil refineries. Then you go along a shipping canal filled with tankers and other oil-industry-related vessels, some engaged in active work, some being repaired in the canal or in dry-dock, some abandoned and derelict. Then you drive a long ways through low grassy meadows of the type you find along seashores. We passed a number of historical markers but they came and went too fast for us to stop and read them. I think this area was important in the early history of Texas oil. Also a major battle in the war for Texas’ independence from Mexico took place nearby at Sabine Pass. There was a big ‘gator said to be in residence in an arm of the Gulf that reached next to our campsite but we didn’t see or hear him. The gulf shore was good for bike-riding and we went a long ways along the shore. The Gulf here is an unappealing brown thing with feeble surf.

 

 

Next day we jumped a few hours down the coast to Galveston Island State Park. The Jimmy Webb/Glen Campbell song (“Galveston, oh Galveston”) was constantly running in the background. I had always been curious about Galveston–the 1900 hurricane flood, its reputation as an “open city” in the first half of the 20^th century.

The hurricane-spawned  flood of 1900 resulted in between 8,000 to 12,000 deaths in Galveston, a city of 40,000 people at the time. It was the highest mortality from a natural disaster in US history. Accounts of the ordeal are harrowing.  Prior to the flood Galveston was one of the most important cities in the country and on the make—banking, tourism, a cultural center, a shipping center, and an immigration port. After the flood the money fled and the town dried up. It was revived by Prohibition, or rather it was revived by flouting Prohibition. It became a sin city, the New Orleans of Texas. This persisted into the 1950s when city managers got all reform-minded and zealous. Some pinch-faced, bible-quoting, finger-wagging scold always comes along and ruins the party. Galveston likes to think it is on the rebound finally, and it does have a lively and appealing seaside, as well as an old town from the late 19^th century that had been neglected but was intact and is being restored. I wish them luck.

Tom Rush recorded a couple albums of blues and folk covers in the early 1960s that were, and still are, among my favorite records. One of them featured a powerful, bluesy spiritual about the Galveston flood. The lyrics were striking and original, with the refrain “Wasn’t that a mighty storm.” Here is a link to a discographer’s research into the songs origins. The writer is a little prolix but the story is interesting. http://singout.org/2016/08/15/wasnt-that-a-mighty-storm/

I toured an industry-sponsored museum on offshore drilling. It made a passing mention to what most people call the BP oil spill and which they refer to as the Macondo oil spill. The museum had some neat, detailed models of various drilling platform designs, but I felt guilty about even being interested in the technology and forking over 6$. The museum is housed in a retired drilling platform and has an expansive view of Galveston harbor, a busy, dirty place. Across the harbor they are building drilling towers to be towed into the gulf. The cargo and industry ships that I saw were some of the rustiest and decrepit vessels I’ve ever seen afloat. Nice pelicans in the harbor, though.

Back out our campsite a few miles outside of town I stayed up late drinking rum with a guy who just gotten laid off from his oil industry job. His specialty was designing the software and hardware that guide the underground drills that extend from the platforms into the seabed. These drills don’t go straight down—they can be steered left-right-up-down to trace a path through multiple cells of oil that have been identified by various seismic tests, soil studies and other technologies. (I had just taken a tour of the gulf drilling museum and was able to work in some industry jargon and acronyms. I do love jargon.) I was being careful not to be too damning of the oil industry but thought he went a little overboard praising the preventive technologies and practices on today’s rigs. I told him that the industry might have designed all kinds of effective safeguards and practice guidelines but, in the end, the workers in the field will take the path of least resistance and do whatever makes their lives easier and makes the work go more quickly. He agreed, saying that he had only been on a platform twice and was appalled by the cavalier handling of materials by the roughnecks and their dismissive attitude toward standards and recommended practices. In any human endeavor—oil drilling, food preparation, finance– you can make all the regulations and requirements you can think of but you can’t legislate away human greed or incompetence. Human frailty will out.

Austin, TX

We booked a site at an RV camp right in the heart of Austin, on the south side of the Colorado River (not the Grand Canyon Colorado, another one.) There were lots of fine eating and music establishments just outside the camp. We ate at Threadgills, and went to the Highball Lounge to see Dale Watson and His Lonestars, a septet with a three-piece horn section that played swing music and had a loungey sort of style. Lots of dancers who all knew one another crowded the big dance floor and Brenda was asked to dance several times which she enjoyed. One of her partners was a friend of the bandleader’s and he took her up to meet Mr. Watson, a flashily-dressed, silver-haired baritone. Watson asked Brenda questions from the stage using his microphone (“are you above or below the Mason Dixon in your part of Maryland?”) and then dedicated a song about Baltimore to her. We had a grand time.

Next day we got together with our old friend Roy who has lived in Austin since the early 1990s. He showed us the sights–we took a tour of the state capitol building, hiked a few miles along Barton River.

 

That night we went to The Hole in the Wall Bar for a multi-artist tribute to an Austin favorite son the late Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet). The most prominent musicians of the town came on stage one after another to perform one of Sahm’s songs so we got a whole showcase of the best local talent.

This period, from New Orleans to Austin, has been the most urban part of our trip and it was a nice change. We dined out, went to shows, and didn’t get in as much exercise as normal. And of course we went way over budget for those few weeks. But it was a really nice change of pace.

I was surprised to learn that Austin is the eleventh largest city in the US, larger in population than Boston or Baltimore. (In fact, of the eleven largest population cities, Texas has four of them.) Roy said that every day 115 people move to Austin. The evidence of this we saw was in the traffic; at least as congested as New York City at all times of day.

The Hill Country and West Texas

The Hill Country is a beautiful part of Texas, south central. Rolling hills, green, forested in places. LBJ’s ranch, a national park now, we paused at, just west of Johnson City. I had never seen this green part of Texas; all my traveling had been in the northern, more barren eco-zone.

 

We got as far as Junction, Texas before we started looking for a camp. The first park we found was closed for the winter. We wound up at North Junction RV Park on the North Llano River. Actually quite a nice, shaded park; clean and well-maintained. We took a walk along the river until someone started yelling at us from a distance and finally drove up to us on an ATV. The camouflage-clad young woman  was not entirely unpleasant as she informed us that people in the vicinity were hunting and we were likely to get our heads blowed off if we continued in that direction. We went into the fair-sized town for groceries and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single person was clothed in camouflage. And every single establishment had a sign that said “Welcome Hunters” or something similar. No lie. Junction is the most hunting-obsessed town I have ever been in. Actually, after reading a local publication the city appears to be in the huntingest county, Kimble County. Hunting-related paraphernalia was on sale in the most unexpected places. An object I had never seen one of before, a device for feeding corn to game animals in the wild, I saw at least a hundred of, for sale in parking lots of all manner of stores. If I were to tarry in Junction Texas I think I would run out of conversational material, tout suit.

 

Next was an rv park right on Highway 10 in Balmorhea. A hand-lettered sign directed us to a simple trailer within the dusty compound. I knocked on the door, a guy opened it and said “twenty bucks,” so I gave him twenty bucks and he went back inside and I picked out a site. I don’t know, maybe he had the actual owner of the place tied up in that trailer. It was a treeless parking lot sort of place about half-tenanted with oil industry roughnecks. There was a saloon next door. I discouraged Brenda from coming with me, saying I should check it out first. Boy was that a good call. Four guys playing pool trying to top one another’s stories about being arrested for drunk driving and surviving the worst county and city jails in west texas. One guy, in the space of twenty minutes, told of three acts of violence he had committed against people he had just met who bothered him in some way. At night we could see a gas flare from an oil well in the near distance. It’s been getting cold these past few nights, like in the 40s. Our first chills since Canada, three months ago.

 

I reserved a spot at a New Mexico State Park at Leesburg Dam, just north of Las Cruces, near the town of Radium Springs. Nice facility—spacious sites, picnic tables in half-wall enclosures with roofs at each site. Miles of trails through the scrub and along the Rio Grande. Mountains in the distance in all directions. The Rio Grande is pretty played out by the time it gets here—it is a thin thread that barely seems to be flowing. It is renourished by other tributaries further south before reaching El Paso. We met a couple, fellow campers, down by the river who were from Severna Park, MD and old hands at camping in the southwest. Another couple we met at the park, from Saranac NY originally, have been traveling in their Scamp-like Casita for two years.

We left Radium Springs to follow the Rio Grande up to Albuquerque where we will stay a month in a little house our daughter is having built on her property. Happy thanksgiving and happy Holidays to all!

 

November 6 to November 12, 2016

 

Davis Bayou, Gulf Islands National Seashore, Mississippi

 

Spent my first night in Mississippi, at the Davis Bayou campground, the western extension of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. This is a far cry from the dazzling sands and blue water of Ft. Pickens in Pensacola. This part of the park is in the bayou on the mainland behind the barrier islands. The barrier islands are a mile out and their descriptions very inviting; a longer stay here should include a kayak trip. We stayed two nights because there were some nice trails for walking and biking, and a large visitor center. The Davis campground was turned into a sort of refugee camp after a recent hurricane (Rita, perhaps?) that made many Mississippians homeless. For over a year the park was filled with full-time residents in campers and tents and some FEMA trailers.

 

We headed west, through Mobile and Gulfport to New Orleans. The infrastructure of the petroleum industry starts appearing here—drilling platforms on the horizon, lots of tanker activity in the ports, pipes stacked in the shipping yard.

A friend of our daughter from high school and college, Chris A., lives in New Orleans, in the Algiers neighborhood, and very generously allowed us to park our trailer in his driveway and hook up to his utilities. Not only that, our friends Donald and Lucy flew down from Bushwood and Chris made his extra room available to them. His house is very cool, a refurbished shotgun style home, only a short 2$ ferry ride to the French Quarter across the Mississippi. There is an historical marker on Chris’s house identifying it as the home of the renowned jazz trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen. (Chris rents his room as an AirBnB so if you are looking for nice accommodations in NOLA let me know.)

 

We made the crossing to the French quarter a couple of times each day—in the morning to take in the sights, in the evening to take in the sounds.

 

Among the acts we saw in clubs—the Iguanas at the Circle Bar; Wendell Brunius and the Preservation Hall All Stars; Tuba Skinny on Frenchman Street; The Palm Court SwingMasters; The Royal Street Windin’ Boys at the 21^st Amendment and another night at a club on Frenchman Street. Several of the city’s hard-charging funky brass bands we encountered on the streets blowing their souls out, nothing held in reserve. One such group had about fifteen members, including five trumpets, and took over an intersection on Frenchman Street for about 20 minutes blasting some high-powered anthems. There were dozens of clubs on a three block stretch of Frenchman street featuring world-class entertainers with a minimal or no cover charge. I don’t think there is a comparable concentration of music to be found in any other city of the world.

Election day coincided with our arrival in New Orleans, which cast a pall over the proceedings for a couple days. I kept hearing the tag line from a Melvin van Peebles song, “This ain’t America/ you can’t fool me.”

 

Veni, comedi, audire – We came, we ate, we listened. And we walked. And imbibed. And generally soaked up the scene. My third time in new Orleans, and each time I discover a new neighborhood to explore. Thanks to Chris I have some sense of Algiers. Next time we’ll spend some time in the Lower Garden district which was only glimpsed from a bus this time. I know what it means to miss New Orleans but after a few days we had to give the town some rest.

October 26 to November 6, 2016—Gulf Islands National Seashore at Fort Pickens Campground

 

The Appalachian Mountains end about 220 miles north of here above Birmingham, Alabama. The mountains have been eroded down to their hardest elements, quartz and granite. The erosion from these deposits tumbles down the Alabama River and enter the Gulf of Mexico as fine white sand. The beaches here are as white as any you will find and finer than sugar. It is fine-grained hourglass sand that squeaks when you walk on it. I had expected the Gulf of Mexico to be a brown, inert body of water but here it is as aquamarine as any beach in the Keys. The wave action is enough to attract surfboarders. Add in the white sand and this is one of the finest stretches of beach I’ve ever seen. Lots of life in the gulf, too. Schools of fish swimming nearby, the occasional sea turtle, blue crabs in the surf.

 

The Gulf Islands National Seashore encompasses long stretches of the barrier islands that extend from the panhandle of Florida to Mississippi. We are in the part adjoining Pensacola Beach. Loop A of the Fort Pickens campground is the smallest of the camping grounds here, maybe forty sites set amid live oaks stunted by salt and wind and lack of soil. I had reserved it back in April so we have the roomiest site if not the shadiest. Around every corner is a little clearing that looks ready-made for filming a scene from the Bible with the twisted live oaks standing in for olive trees.  The gulf and the sound are both a short walk away. Fort Pickens is about two miles down the road. Forts are the oldest structures in Florida and elsewhere because they are so massive and, with the invention of rifled artillery in the Civil War, became obsolete almost overnight.  They were so vulnerable that no army tried to defend them so no army felt compelled to attack them so they pretty much survive intact.

 

We are in full beach bum mode. Take a hike or a bike ride, go in the gulf, make dinner, a couple drinks before bed. Rinse and repeat. The Blue Angels flight team is stationed at Pensacola navy base across the sound and practice overhead frequently. Quite the sight. I wouldn’t get in my car to drive to an air show but I enjoy watching the six planes practicing their immelmans, power dives, double farvels, barrel rolls, etc. And the jet engine screams are out of this world. If I were an enemy combatant and experienced a formation of these suckers coming at me I think I would take up another occupation.

 

There are a few armadillos here and they snuffle about as if they own the place, brushing against your leg under the picnic table, knocking things over in their single-minded pursuit of the maggots that fall crawl out of the live oak acorns after they have eaten all the acorn meat. Can there be a stranger-looking critter than the armadillo?

 

 

 

 

November 1, 2016—Mechanical issues of the past five months

We have had some mechanical issues to deal with over the past five months, altho they have been mostly minor.

As light as it is, the trailer is subjected to a lot of bouncing around and things rattle loose. Early on I noticed that a trickle of water was running from under the toilet into the shower enclosure. Something had shook loose in the supply line to the toilet; the flushing mechanism and associated piping had to be dismantled, tightened and reassembled.

I detected moisture under the sink, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. It took me over a month to find that the collar holding down the spigot over the sink had come loose and every time it was used a little water would trickle out and back down under the sink, spreading over the various water supply lines and water heater infrastructure under there. The small leak was impossible for me to track down until it became a torrent, then any idiot could see where it was coming from.

The screws holding the table base down backed out and the subsequent swaying of the table base eventually tore the screws from their moorings. I just had to rotate the base a little and screw it down again. The new screws have held fast since Michigan.

Back in North Carolina the guy who repacked the wheel bearings left the trailer breakaway pin disconnected, which is how I discovered that the breakaway device (which locks up the trailer brakes in the event it becomes disconnected from the truck, so it doesn’t pass you going down a mountain road) wasn’t working. Couldn’t do anything about it myself and had to wait until we were situated in a place for an extended period near a city so I could hire a mechanic to come out and look at it; that didn’t happen until 2 months later in Stuart Florida. I had a guy named Joe from Father & Son Mobile RV Repair come out. Joe and his mullet head arrived on schedule and he proceeded to disconnect and rearrange the wiring around my batteries. In short order the breakaway device was working. He couldn’t find the leak under the sink which was plaguing me at the time, nor could he address the slight leak around a seal in the graywater tank. So I paid $180 to get the breakaway device rewired. A week and 150 miles later I realized that my batteries weren’t charging, either by being connected to the truck or by being plugged in at campsites. I called Joe and his mullet and they immediately got all defensive, suggesting that both the truck and the trailer charger had, remarkably, blown fuses at the same time which prevented the batteries from charging (no), or some other miraculous combination of failures,  but whatever it was it wasn’t his fault because “..listen,  I work on million dollar motor coaches,” leaving something unsaid . When I had watched him work on the truck battery connections I wondered why he was hooking up an extraneous wire that I knew to be left over from some modification the previous owner had installed and removed. Not being in a position to find help from an electrician I decided to disconnect that particular wire and, behold, the batteries are charging when it is in towing mode. There is still a problem with the DC charging system but it can wait until New Mexico.

The graywater leak was a miniscule leak, maybe a drop every ten minutes, until Joe and his mullet started poking around, then it became a regular drip-drip-drip and had to be dealt with. I had to empty the wastewater tank, wait two days for it to dry out, remove old sealant around the suspect connection, and spread some epoxy over the pipe joints, which worked.

Every screw that can be seen needs to be tightened periodically. It’s the ones I can’t see that keep me up at night. But as you can see we have been pretty much trouble free these past five months. When we get to Albuquerque I plan on replacing some worn parts but it is mostly cosmetic.