December 19, 2023
San Felipe, Baja, Mexico

Technically I spent February in Arizona, so this might be more properly called my second month as a snowbird, but I botched it up in February by leaving Spokane after it got cold and snowy, then returning while it was still cold and snowy.  Though I enjoyed the month in the van, I guess I just hadn’t quite got my head wrapped around how to be a proper snowbird.

So the plan was to leave before Thanksgiving and avoid the snow.  The day before I left, however, nature had the last laugh.

After two nights on the road, I was parked up in my brother’s driveway in Los Osos on the bottom of Morro Bay.  Shorts and t-shirt weather here!  Great family, food, and adult beverages, as well.  Tim and Kim never fail in that regard.

Going for a walk one morning I saw something I had never seen (or never noticed) there in Los Osos.  People just leave their kayaks on the shore of the bay.  You are supposed to mark it with your name and phone number, but nobody seems to molest them.  Hundreds of them.  In thirty-five years of visiting family there, I never noticed this.  Pretty cool.

We kayaked and SUPed across Morro Bay to the dunes, then hiked along the beach.

And, allowing me to further laugh at my friends in Spokane, Cayucos had a surfing contest the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  Followed (by us) with a hike along the bluffs.

From Los Osos I headed south to Yuma where I hung out with Jack Freer and his Corgi WIley for a couple of weeks.  This was exceptionally convenient and Jack has a Jeep so we drove all the hell over the desert without my having to daily shift the van from sleep mode to drive mode then back again.  I hadn’t seen Jack face-to-face in about ten years and we had a good time telling tall tales and exploring the desert around Yuma Proving Ground.

This was in an area very close to a bombing range and we never did figure out what it was.  We hazarded (literally perhaps) that it was a spent flare.  We left that area quickly.

My original plan was to spend a couple of nights at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which has a huge and very nice campground, then head south of the border at the Lukeville border crossing.  Just days before I wanted to go, however, they closed the Lukeville crossing, so I headed south through San Luis, just south of Yuma.

I waited maybe two minutes in line to get to customs.  Because I had an RV they directed me to an inspection point where there was a short and very perfuctory search of the van.  I had tried, and failed, to get an FMM (something akin to a Visa) online.  I tried to get it at the Oficina de Migración at the San Luis border crossing, but there were computer issues there, so I was sent to Sonoita which, ironically, is the Mexican town across the border from Lukeville.  This only added about forty minutes to my chosen route, so no biggy.  The office in Sonoita was so sleepy a cleaning lady had to rustle up a pleasant young dude who charged my credit card and issued an FMM.  Then off to my first night in Puerto Penasco.

PP is casually called Rocky Point by almost everyone, though no one seems to know why.  Even the officials at both immigracion offices asked if I was going to Rocky Point.  As an example of how much this nickname has caught on:

I found this rather amusing:

Rocky Point is about the closest coastal place for RVs to the US Border and is very popular with snowbirds.  Perhaps owing to the closed border at Lukeville, it seemed to have very few people (gringos or Mexicans) for a town of 65k people.

Pharmacies are quite popular with gringos (both US and Canadian) as you don’t need a prescription for most medications and they tend to be a LOT cheaper than in the US or Canada.  This one even sold “Super Viagra.”

The RV park was simply a huge dirt lot, but the lot itself was right on the Sea of Cortez, if my van was maybe in the second row.

This pretty well summarizes the scene.

And, in town, a blast from the past.

As Rocky Point didn’t do much for me, I next drove along the top of the Sea of Cortes and spent a night at an extremenly pleasant ranch owned by a guy name Don Thousand, thus the name Rancho Mil.  He has space for campers and charges about $15.  Extremely quite and beautiful.

After an extremely peaceful night at Rancho Mil, the next stop was:

My brother Tom and I had been here over 35 years ago in early January.  It was cold, windy, and basically had the appearance of a fishing village abandoned for the winter.  The was one cheap motel and a couple of restaurants.   It was a sleepy dump.

Today it is a town of almost 20k people with big box food stores, many small hotels, and dozens of restaurants.  Still not exactly glamorous, it is a pleasant enough place to hang out for a week.

Very peaceful and very much not cold and snowing.  Like Spokane.

Oh, and I’m in taco heaven.  The first day here I ate tacos birria at Birrieria el Pablano.  Simple and unfussy, they were delicious.

None of the structures in town look particularly sturdy or well-maintained and everything has the appearance of lacking permanence.  One gets the feeling that people do what they have to in order to scrape by and that whatever that is likely changes frequently.

One counterexample was El Kikiriki, known for tacos al pastor.  It had rave online reviews going back twelve years so has been popular (and in the same location) for at least that long.  They are famous for tacos al pastor.

When I first moved to Spokane, several local places served tacos adobaba, with which I was unfamiliar.  Marinated pork with maybe a touch of sweet citrus flavor.  I get them occasionally as they are pretty good.  I had heard of, and tried on a few occasions, al pastor, but never realized they are one in the same.

Al pastor means “shepherd style” and came from Lebanese immigrants to the Puebla area bringing lamb shwarma with them.  As pork is more popular than lamb in Mexico, you get pork al pastor.

They were very good, if maybe a bit rich.  A treat more than an everyday food.

And, with tacos, it’s all about the condiments.

I spent a week in San Felipe which was most relaxing, but the RV park where I stayed was getting a bit noisy with gringos riding dirt bikes in and out all day, so I decided to move on.