The Baja road trip

After a month in San Pancho, we weren’t ready to be done.

Instead of slipping quietly back into “normal life,” we decided to go bigger: a full road trip from our home in Oregon all the way down the length of the Baja peninsula, to the southern tip of Baja California Sur, and back again.

It was long stretches of highway, tiny roadside towns, perfect coves with no one else around, and more tacos and fish than we probably needed. It also gave us a taste of what it really feels like to live out of our car for weeks at a time.

This is the trip that convinced us we could actually do this long‑term.

We left home in Beaverton, Oregon, on August 16th, 2021, for an epic road trip that would span the next several months. Our first destination was San Rafael, CA, where my younger sister lives with her family. My parents live nearby in Novato, so we were able to visit them as well. On August 18th, we continued our drive south to Tustin, CA, where we stayed in the house I grew up in while we visited some friends and spent a day at Newport Beach. We stopped by the infamous Wedge to watch the crazy waves and fearless body surfers before continuing our drive south to San Diego.

We arrived on August 19th, in the late afternoon, at our hotel in San Diego, where we would attend a house music festival called “West Coast Weekender,” put on by an amazing crew of people mostly from Chicago. Many of our friends from Portland were in attendance, and we met a lot of great people over the next several days as we partied late into the night, dancing to house music.

After checking into the hotel, we went to check in for the music festival to get our wristbands and merch. As we were leaving, I noticed someone checking in who I thought I recognized. I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t say anything at the time. I figured there would be plenty of time to connect the dots over the next few days. The following day at the pool, I approached him, confident we had known each other in the past. “Did you go to SF State?” “Yes.” “Is your name Brandon?” “Yes.” Bingo! Mystery solved! Brandon and I had met in 1993 at San Francisco State University, where we both lived in the dorms. Brandon was from Sacramento, and I dated one of his best friends for about a year while in college. We weren’t exactly best buddies, but we crossed paths regularly and were always friendly. In fact, soon after we met, there was a party in my dorm room with lots of people, including some Spaniards, one of whom was my roommate. My roommate and a few of his friends were bullying Brandon, so I stood up for him and told them to knock it off. I was still in contact with my old girlfriend from college, so Brandon and I snapped a photo together and sent it to her. She was overjoyed to see that we had reconnected — completely at random — at a house music festival in San Diego. Funny how the universe works like that. Reconnecting with Brandon after roughly 25 years was one of those moments that makes you think the world is a lot smaller than it seems.

On August 22nd, we went to a baseball game at Petco Park with some friends from Portland, then attended a boat party in the San Diego Bay that evening as part of the music festival.

On August 24th, we drove south from San Diego, entering Mexico without so much as making eye contact with a single human as we crossed the border. Zero fanfare. No passport stamp. Just a casual roll into another country. We stopped at a winery in the Valle de Guadalupe. The wine was decent, so we grabbed a few bottles to bring along on the trip. We checked into our hotel in Misión Santa María in the late afternoon and went for a walk along the beach, where I promptly stepped on a jellyfish. My foot swelled up like a balloon — a charming start to the Baja leg of our journey. This was a strategic overnight stop because the next day’s drive would take us across the vast desert that stretches hundreds of miles through the heart of the Baja peninsula. Leaving Santa María with a full tank of gas was absolutely essential.

On August 25th, we continued south from Misión Santa María to Santa Rosalía, an old mining town and the first sign of civilization on the Sea of Cortez in Baja California Sur. We stayed at a hotel just south of town, perched on the bluffs overlooking the sea. The hotel was maybe a two-star joint, and the room ran about $40 a night. You get what you pay for — but the view was priceless.

On August 26th, as we continued south from Santa Rosalía, we stopped in Mulegé and had some of the best Baja fish tacos of the entire trip. Then we explored a couple of beaches between Mulegé and Loreto, eventually ending the day in Loreto, where we stayed for the next two nights. We revisited some of the beaches between Loreto and Mulegé because they were absolutely incredible. The stretch between Santa Rosalía and Loreto is strange, to say the least. It gives off a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max vibe — barren wasteland, crumbling oceanfront ruins, and a sparse population that makes you wonder if you missed a memo about the end of the world.

On August 28th, we drove from Loreto to Todos Santos, where we would spend the next two weeks at an Airbnb with no AC. We only discovered this delightful detail upon arrival, and it was hot. The night we arrived, we met some really great people from Colorado who had been living in Todos Santos since the pandemic started. As you do.

On September 6th, we took a day trip to Balandra Bay, just outside of La Paz. This beach is easily one of the top ten beaches I’ve ever set foot on. The turquoise water, the shallow sandbars, the dramatic rock formations — it’s the kind of place that makes you question every life decision that doesn’t involve living within walking distance of it. I’d tell you more, but honestly, just go see it for yourself.

As our stay in Todos Santos was winding down, we were hit by Hurricane Olaf. We had planned to leave Todos Santos and drive an hour and a half to San José del Cabo on Friday, September 10th. The hurricane hit on the evening of Thursday, September 9th. As the rains intensified and darkness fell, we hunkered down for what turned out to be a very loud and chaotic night. The hurricane scored a direct hit on us. It was “only” a Category 1, but let me tell you — when the wind is ripping things off rooftops outside your window, the Saffir-Simpson scale feels a bit academic. Anticipating we’d lose power, I had given my team at work a heads-up that I might be unreachable the next day due to the hurricane. What we didn’t anticipate was that losing power also meant losing water. A fun little bonus. It was so loud that we couldn’t sleep until the eye of the storm passed over us, granting a brief, eerie calm. Then we were jolted awake again as the back half of the storm raged through.

By morning, the storm was subsiding. It was still raining, and we knew we were stranded until the arroyos drained enough for us to drive out. A tinaco — one of those big rooftop water tanks — had been blown off the roof and landed right next to our car. A few feet to the left and we’d have had a very different day. Shortly after noon on September 10th, we were finally able to drive out of Todos Santos toward San José del Cabo. When we arrived at our Airbnb, we found the place inundated with water from the storm. We cleaned it up as best we could before realizing the internet wasn’t working. The next day someone came to try to fix it, but no luck — something outside had been damaged during the storm and wouldn’t be replaced for several days. The owner was gracious about refunding our money, and we found another unit in the same development to rent for a couple of weeks. Upon arrival in San José del Cabo, I noticed an early Friday morning meeting that had been added to my calendar late on Thursday. This was a meeting with my boss’s boss — someone I never, ever meet with. Obviously, I missed it, what with the hurricane and all. Needless to say, this mysterious last-minute meeting made me very nervous, given its nature and the fact that I never meet with this person. With only a few hours left in the workday on Friday, I attempted to reschedule for that same day. I didn’t want to spend the entire weekend spiraling about potentially losing my job. No luck. We’d have to reschedule for Monday. Fantastic. Now I got to marinate in anxiety all weekend. Traci joked, “Maybe you’re getting a promotion?” A remote possibility, I thought. I guess we’d find out Monday.

The same day we arrived in San José del Cabo (September 11th, 2021), a couple we had met in San Diego, Josh and Vanessa, were flying in to DJ a few shows in the area. We picked them up from the airport and took them to their hotel in el centro, then reconnected later at the club where they were spinning that night. The next day, we headed to Cabo San Lucas for a rooftop pool party DJ’d by our friends. We stayed in Cabo that night and hit up a beach club on September 12th where our friends were once again behind the decks. At the beach club, we met a young couple from Austria, Ander and Siglinda, who happened to be staying in the same development in San José del Cabo as us. Over the next couple of weeks, we became fast friends over our shared passions for traveling, surfing, and good food.

On September 18th, we drove north from San José del Cabo to a swimming hole in the Sierra de la Laguna Biosphere Reserve, then continued on to Cabo Pulmo. We explored Cabo Pulmo for a while before driving back to our home base in San José del Cabo. That evening, we met up with a friend of a friend who had just bought an apartment nearby — because apparently everyone was buying real estate down here.

On September 22nd, we visited Playa Chileno, a gorgeous beach nestled between San José del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas.

On September 24th, we flew to Oaxaca City.

On September 29th, we flew back to San José del Cabo and drove to La Paz. We had booked the penthouse suite in a gated community on a hill overlooking the city. Sounds fancy, right? Well, buckle up. When we pulled up to the security gate, the guard turned us away, insisting we were in the wrong place. We drove around to three different gated community entrances and were turned away from all of them. Messages to our host went unanswered. After about an hour of this, we convinced ourselves we knew which entrance was correct and essentially demanded entry. Once inside, we found two buildings that could be the one we were looking for. With some help from locals, we made our way to the right building. Now we needed to get keys from a lockbox to gain entry. There was a wall lined with several lockboxes, so we were feeling cautiously optimistic. We tried the code we’d been given on one of them. It opened — first try! Confidence surging, we entered the building and started looking for our unit, only to discover it didn’t exist. Back to the lockboxes. We tried the code on another one. It also opened. Turns out the rental company managed multiple units in this complex and used the same lockbox code for all of them. What could possibly go wrong with that strategy? We were now more than two hours into this treasure hunt, and the host was still ghosting us. After a cavalcade of wrong keys, wrong lockboxes, and mounting frustration, we arrived at the only logical conclusion: we were never finding this apartment, and it was time to book a hotel. Naturally, the moment we were about to leave, the host finally messaged us with more information about which lockbox to use. So we located the apartment, opened yet another lockbox, retrieved the keys — and they didn’t work. We asked the host to come meet us in person, which, one might argue, they should have done three hours ago. Or, at the very least, they could have notified the security guard we were coming. The host finally materialized 45 minutes later and opened the door. Apparently, the key only turns one way — which, of course, was not the way we’d been trying. Checking into this Airbnb was the single worst check-in experience of our lives, and we sincerely hope to never repeat it. The entire three-and-a-half-hour ordeal could have been avoided if the host had cared just a tiny bit more.

The apartment itself, however, was stunning — spacious, with a jaw-dropping view of the city below. Almost worth the saga. Almost.

On September 30th, I made my first-ever batch of salsa macha. I burned the chilis and had to start over. The second batch, thankfully, came out great. Lesson learned: salsa macha demands your full, undivided attention — not unlike navigating Baja itself.

During our stay in La Paz, our new friends, Ander and Siglinda, whom we met in Cabo San Lucas, came to stay with us for a few nights, since we had an extra bedroom and a pretty sick pad. They arrived October 1st. They were great guests! We did a morning yoga workout together on the patio one morning. We also took a boat trip out to Isla Espirito Santo, and swam with sea lions at the sea lion sanctuary at the far north of the island. The boat trip was pretty epic. We got rained on really hard on the way out, but it cleared up by the time we arrived at the sea lion sanctuary. Swimming with the sea lions was pretty surreal. They are really right next to you, looking at you as much as you are looging at them. The boat trip also took us to a beautiful secluded beach on Isla Espirito Santo, where we enjoyed lunch and did some more snorkeling. It was super fun to share this amazing experience with our new friends.

Of course, we took our friends to Balandra Bay for a some beach time before they returneed to San Jose del Cabo on October 3rd, 2021. Our stay on La Paz ended on October 5th, as we returned to Todos Santos that day for a month long stay, this time with AC and sweet pool!

Our first night in Todos Santos this time was a wild one! Of course we made some new friends, Aaron and Laura, and had a great time, the details of which can only be shared over a beer or two.