Land's End to Land's End...

[bkrobbie]

All - I’m stealing a few moments to write this at Land’s End, though not the Land’s End that might jump to mind for most on this forum. I’m a mile or so from the tip of the Gaspe Peninsula, at Forillon National Park in Quebec.

The Appalachian Mountains make their last stand here against the Atlantic Ocean as it meets the St. Lawrence River, and it is stunning – the hardiest of the granite and shale that the glaciers left behind them when they retreated thousands of years ago, blanketed in a thick, boreal forest which ends at cliffs that drop directly into the slate blues and greys of the cold sea.

The peoples who first lived here considered this point to be the end of the earth.

For my family and I, it’s just the beginning.



Both my wife and I have lived in New York City for 20 years, on her part making the decision to set out from Minneapolis to see what the big city had to offer, and for mine, instinctively following a host of friends after graduating from college, looking for jobs, some excitement, and to begin the rest our lives.

We met in New York in a dive bar on Avenue A, and after years of convincing, she finally threw in the towel and decided to marry me.

Several carefree years later we were actual adults. We had a baby girl. I had a career. We had a mortgage. I owned many, many ties. Another baby girl showed up. My birthday cake became crowded with candles, and my thirties were quietly stalked and overthrown by my forties.

And while we had, in our earlier years, talked about what it might be like to take time away from the narrow, hectic cycle of working to pay bills and fund some distant idea of retirement, we somehow never made it to the point where that particular dream crystalized, or was brought into relief.

Then, starting about four years ago, the global economic crisis made my job enormously stressful, less remunerative, and all-round miserable. I could not afford any new ties. I would wake up in the middle of the night, driven from my dreams by a nebulous but sharp, insistent worry that I could not shake. My optimisms about my career, my family, and my life were eroding under a constant deluge of stressors.

It was awful.

In the middle of all this, a good friend of mine cajoled me into training for an Ironman (the real deal: a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike, and a full 26.2 mile marathon to cap things off).

While inherently crazy for a guy my age to roll off the sofa and do something like this, it was no less crazy than responding to the worries that plagued me every night by drinking a tumbler of scotch and hoping they went away.

So I signed up for the race and laid out a schedule and with the unfailing support of my wife disappeared every morning at 4:30 to go do something – ride my bike, run, swim. Some days, all three.

All that time training gave me a lot of time to talk to myself (really, who else are you going to have a conversation with when you’re in a pool for two hours) and made me realize how valuable my time was to me.

It also made me prioritize everything I was doing, because I just didn’t have any time to waste. Not a minute.

So, time, everything about my time and indeed my life, while never not valuable to me, became so much more important.

And I would have to be crazy to waste it.

I found myself sitting at my desk, staring at my computer and my phone and being ushered further away from my wife, my girls, my friends, the world outside, effectively being away from myself. So here I was, doing something that was in effect a waste of my time – consuming it while simultaneously fostering huge amounts of negative energy, worry, even fear.

I talked about it with my wife, and we decided to do it - we pulled that dream of ours kicking and screaming into this world from the quiet comfort of the “someday” in which it had been gestating all this time, and we made it tangible. Concrete.

And I walked into work on a Monday morning and quit my job.

I finished the Lake Placid Ironman a week later.

And then my wife and I put our girls in the back of our truck and we started driving.

Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick, then up into the Gaspe.

And here we are.



Nothing is set in stone, but during our travel days we have looked at the dog-eared pages of our Michelin road atlas and an idea presented itself – since we more or less began this trip at one end of the earth, why not head to the other end before turning back?

My wife had been to the Baja Peninsula years before, kayaking the coast along the Sea of Cortez for a month. She was prepared, fit, skilled, and had the trip of a lifetime.

I have also been to the Baja Peninsula. I drove there with a close friend of mine the moment we graduated from college, piling into his 1986 Ford Bronco at my folks house in Toronto without so much as a map. We were unprepared, unfit, and had no skills (save being fantastically naïve) - we simply started driving south.

We had the trip of a lifetime.

Why couldn't we do the same again?

 

[jimi breeze]

Life is an incredible journey.... and are about to find out the truth to this saying -more than many of us will.
Wish you and your family the best.

 

[rag1998]

Inspiring story, wish you guys the best..Hope to do the same someday!!

 

[JCMatthews]

More please!

 

[fireball]

Very well written. Good luck on your journey and I'll look forward to hearing more about it!

 

[bkrobbie]

Thanksgiving in Tucson



We have achieved total consciousness, along the banks of the Rio Grande.

A long overdue update... since my last post we worked our way from Northern Quebec (moose!) to upstate New York, went crabbing among the wild ponies of Assateague, down to Pensacola (warm!), then west and south into Big Bend National Park (tarantulas!) for some backcountry camping, and from there got snowed in for the better part of a week in New Mexico before getting free of this ridiculous Arctic Storm to land, on our feet, in Tucson.

I was able to get my own website up and running so the adventures are documented, on an ongoing basis, at rovingbugs.com.

I've written about the build of our truck here, which I think may be of some interest to a number of folks here though I primarily used tried and true Expedition Portal recipes with our 2005 Tacoma. I've had really good experiences dealing with the folks at Sierra Expeditions and Front Runner with regard to gear purchases.

We're going to spend this next week in Tucson with both sets of Grandparents doting on the kids and getting the truck sorted out for the next leg, which will take us west again in California, at which point we'll head down into the Baja for a couple months.

This site has been a great resource to me, so if there's any way I can pay it forward by answering any questions please do let me know. I'll try to get in touch, subject to the vagaries of internet connection, as soon as practical.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

 

[bkrobbie]

Baja Time Warp: 1993

This is on the website, too, but I love this story and figured I'd post here also...

From Assateague, we found our way to Washington and enjoyed a terrific, prolonged stay with our close, close friends Mark and Montse and their daughter, Elena.

Mark also happens to have been my co-conspirator in one of the most poorly planned and prepared for road trips I have ever been on, back in the Cretaceous Era, predating GPS, cell phones, and common sense.

The two of us, the ink barely dry on our diplomas in 1993, found ourselves graduating without really having a good idea of what to do. I had considered continuing on in academia, as I had enjoyed my studies tremendously, but the good people at the Rhodes committee decided against awarding me a scholarship and the only place I applied to in order to continue my work at a graduate level had the audacity to not accept me.

Adrift, and well behind my classmates when it came to seeking gainful employment, I frantically cast about and applied for jobs at everything from advertising agencies to consulting firms to investment banks in New York. After all, I had to pay for my education somehow, and bankers seemed to have lots of money.

Nobody seemed inclined to hire a Canadian liberal arts major with a specialty in literature and cultural anthropology. Every one of the large investment banks I applied to seemed to be compelled to invite me in for an interview, if only to spend the entire interview process asking me a series of questions that revealed their incredulity that a guy with my academic background would actually apply to be an investment banker in the first place.

Of course, the tectonic forces of irony worked their magic to close the gap between myself and these financial institutions, and I got a single job offer, from a management consulting firm that specialized solely in working for (wait for it) investment banks.

With my offer in hand in late May, and a September start date, I realized I had no grand plans for the summer.

This looming vacuum presented both a problem and an opportunity, and I joined forces with the one person I knew full well would be equally as disorganized about his future as I was, and equally as adventure-prone: Mark.

I got all my stuff home to Toronto from New Jersey, leaving Mark with my address (of course, he lived in Houston but no matter) and told him to “pick me up” so we could go on a road trip “somewhere”.

And he showed up, materializing in my driveway in a game-looking mid-80s Ford Bronco with Texas plates, fascinating my neighbors and provoking some concern with my parents (“So, what exactly are you two going to do again?”).

The point was, we didn’t know what we were going to do. We didn’t have much money, but we also didn’t really have anything to do for months, so we figured we’d drive around and see as much of America as we could. It had certainly worked for Kerouac.

While convalescing at my parent’s house and idly reviewing road atlases, a friend of mine came up with some extra Van Halen concert tickets for us, and at one point, as we all rocked our faces off to Cabo Wabo, Mark turned to me and said “Hey – let’s go to Cabo” and we did, leaving the next morning.

***

We had thrown ourselves wholly and completely at the mercy of the fates as only young men can do, and we had adventure upon adventure. We survived by the skin of our teeth, without the benefit of the constant contact and information afforded by this current era of cell phones and ubiquitous internet connectivity, working from paper and showing up on doorsteps and hoping our friends would be home (indeed, hoping they were the right doorsteps in the first place).

We got into trouble but never danger, at least for the most part.

All kinds of things went wrong, which almost always led to something going right.

We wandered around the beach at Charleston late one afternoon because we were broke and had nowhere to stay. The two lifeguards on duty took pity on us and dragged us out for a night on the town.

The Bronco’s alternator decided to throw in the towel in the middle of the Painted Desert, at dusk, and we coasted to the shoulder of the road as the stereo emitted the last, drawn-out words of our favorite books on tape series (the adventures of detective Travis McGee), and we wondered what the hell we were going to do.

So, we sat on the tailgate and Mark pulled out his guitar and we sang and I fixed us bourbon, lime and warm Coke cocktails and we chased them with cold cans of Pabst we had squirreled away in the cooler, and we were elated when a State Trooper pulled over in the darkness.

We walked over to his car to greet him and explain our plight, and he stood there, staring, shining his flashlight at us and then the bar I had set up in the back of the truck and asked us what the hell we were doing.

The Navajo Nation is, of course, dry, and here we were having happy hour in the middle of its prohibition.

Mark, a diplomat by nature, sized up the cop and told him that it would probably make sense for him to confiscate the remaining ice cold beer we had with us, and take us to the next town where we could call a mechanic, and then leave us outside a local motel as “punishment” so we could think about how foolish we’d been. And the cop did.

But the trip to Cabo, which I think about often, and which Mark and I reminisced about yet again over his dinner table, has one standout event, a story that demonstrates both how incredibly foolish we were, and how incredibly lucky.

***

We made it down the Baja peninsula and spent ourselves in every way in Cabo. It was our final stop on the trip, and there we ran through the last of our money and the last of our time.

We woke up one last morning to soak away our hangovers in the ocean, and we loaded the truck with supplies for the long trip back to Houston (which, because we were young, comprised a couple cases of beer, some tequila, a bottle of bourbon and various tobacco products).

We decided to travel up the west coast of the peninsula, along the Sea of Cortez, to take a ferry from La Paz to the mainland. From there, we’d cross Mexico and head north into Texas and then on to Houston where we’d shower, I’d fly to New York and start my new job, and he’d head down to Chile to start his.

It made sense, right up until our arrival at the ferry port which was completely deserted in an incredibly eerie way – giant parking lots empty, office buildings empty and locked, fences padlocked, but in a way that was recent, as though en masse, the entire infrastructure of this ferry port and been abandoned overnight.

Which, as it turns out, it was.

We finally located a security guard, who explained that there was a hurricane headed up the Sea of Cortez and all shipping traffic had been held in ports on the mainland, including the ferry. We were advised to leave the area immediately in the event the weather made landfall – the facility itself had been ordered closed by the local authorities.

All right then. We at least had most of a tank of gas and figured we would continue to work our way up the west side of the peninsula, along a highway that our road map clearly indicated would take us to the border crossing at Mexicali, with multiple towns along the way where we could refuel.

It would cost us a lot of time, but with the two of us driving more or less nonstop we’d ultimately still be OK to make our flights.

So we pointed El Bronco north in the afternoon, and started driving on a lovely, recently-paved highway. As the sun set over the spine of mountains to our west, the pavement disappeared and was replaced with well-graded gravel, which surprised us and certainly the Mexican cartographer who had a two lane, paved highway indicated for the next 200 miles.

Then, toward midnight, one of the lanes disappeared, and we were on gravel singletrack, which also began to snake and weave its way up through the mountains and then drop back down to the black waters of the Sea of Cortez.

At maybe one in the morning, I was driving, and suddenly the steering got incredibly sloppy. An inspection by the flickering of a Zippo revealed that the right front tire had been torn open by a rock, so we replaced it with one of our two spares. It was the first time during our entire fifteen thousand mile trip that we had a flat.

Mark took over, and ten minutes later he pulled to the side of the road.

The desert had claimed another tire, and as we were changing it in the pitch black night (the sky had clouded over, and the total absence of star or moonlight reminded us that there was a hurricane on the way) we took a good, wordless look at each other.

The road was a disaster, the map was clearly totally incorrect in its identification of road conditions (hell, of roads) and so the gas station at the town that should be right around the goddamn corner might not be there at all. We had less than half a tank. We had not seen a single person, a car or hacienda or shack or light in the distance, since we left the security guard at the ferry port.

And we had exactly no spare tires at this point, in an environment that was consuming them at a rate of one every ten minutes.

We did the sensible thing, which was to sit on the tailgate and play the guitar and have a good mouthful of bourbon each, while digesting the basic truth of just how screwed we really were.

We rolled the shredded tire into the back of the truck, and kept driving north.

The road, at one point, simply stopped being a road. We had the Bronco in 4WD low, and were basically navigating the thing from one problem to another, our only confirmation that we were going remotely the right direction was our view of the Sea of Cortez on the right.

We tried to avoid rocks to save the tires, but that’s kind of like saying while we were scuba diving we tried to avoid the water to keep our hair dry.

We inched forward, Mark at the wheel, me glued to the utterly useless map and both of us watching the gas gage dip from a third to a quarter to an eighth. Every now and then I would run out to scout the way forward.

The sun rose, to reveal that the mountains we had been traversing were an extraordinary chocolate brown hue, and that whatever storm clouds had obscured the moon and stars had moved on, sparing us from having our problems compounded by a hurricane.

So, from a meteorological point of view, the two of us were fine.

However, we were in the middle of a desert, we had no food and no water, no spare tires, no way to communicate with anyone, were about to have no gas, and nobody knew where we were. Including us.

Which is to say, we had a real, unsolvable problem, and despite the inherent optimism of youth, we knew it, absolutely knew it deep in our exhausted, dehydrated bones.

We opened a couple of warm sunrise beers at the top of a crest. The miserable little light at the bottom of the gas gage blinked on as the Bronco labored up a hill, signaling doom within the next ten miles or so.

As the oblique light brought the desert slowly back to life and we sipped our lukewarm cans of Tecate, we saw a silver band weaving through the hilltop ahead of us.

“Is that a road?”

Mark had a thoughtful sip.

“It’s not not a road.”

We finished the beers and jumped back in the truck. We had ten, maybe fifteen good miles and then we were walking, but the maybe road in front of us was ripe with promise, and possible salvation.

As Mark eased the truck over the crest we saw a little gravel road suddenly begin, in front of us, and he went to put the truck back into two wheel drive to maximize our potential mileage. Of course, the transmission, overwhelmed by the trail it had just been asked to traverse, refused to comply, and we were stuck in four wheel low.

No matter, we were on a road and the sun had risen and we were driving up a mountain through a pass. As we crested the pass, we looked down and, at the very limits of our vision, saw a smallish harbor with what were certainly homes dotting the hillside above.

The Bronco was stuttering at this point, running on fumes but we were headed downhill and Mark only brushed the brakes as we pitched into corners to conserve as much momentum as possible.

Closer now, we could actually see the magical green and white PEMEX awning in what was more or less the center of the village, and we whooped and hollered and screamed with joy. We were saved.

The truck gasped its way through town, and Mark maintained the PEMEX station in his sights and I looked out my window at the smallish houses that dotted the road, all of which were shuttered tight with closed doors, in some cases padlocked.

Odd.

The engine gave out but Mark shifted seamlessly into neutral and we glided to a halt beside the Pemex pump and leapt out of the truck.

We stood there, looking at the pump, which was padlocked shut. We looked at the cashier’s booth, which was padlocked shut and had plywood nailed over the windows. We looked around us, and slowly absorbed that every damn house we looked at, rising in neat little rows away from the harbor, was boarded shut.

The fishing boats in the harbor were not in the harbor, having all been pulled up well past the high tide line and overturned, engines gone, winterized in a place that had never known winter.

I finally said it.

“Jesus, Mark. We’re in a ghost town”.

We thought about that until a loud pop had us both spin on our heels at the same time, startled, to locate its source. It was the truck, more precisely, the front passenger tire of the truck, which finally decided to burst and deflate at that very point.

The front of the Bronco sank slowly to the ground, the poor girl having finally thrown in the towel, and with her broken transmission, devoid of gas, kneeled to the ground on a dusty rim and made clear her intention to go no further.

***

We grabbed a couple warm beers, and, largely because there was nothing else for us to do, reconnoitered the town. It was a smallish place with a dusty grid of roads radiating from a horseshoe bay, maybe fifty or so homes, all of which were sealed shut and had been for some unknown amount of time, but clearly not just overnight in response to a possible hurricane.

We didn’t know what to do.

We talked it over, we were at the point that we were going to have to break into one of the houses to hopefully get some water, maybe food, and then try to figure out a way to get the PEMEX pump to operate, assuming there was even any gas in the reservoir. We didn’t know how we would fix the tires or inflate them. We started eyeing the boats.

Unnervingly, a pack of dogs began to express interest in us, and its membership grew as we wandered through town.

We had an axe in the truck, and after we stood and eyed the pack of smaller but hungry looking dogs, and with the reality of how miserable our situation was setting in, we agreed to go back to the Bronco to get it, frequently glancing over our shoulders to make sure the pack wasn’t getting too close.

Which, of course, it was.

Mark and I rounded a corner and began to hustle back to the Bronco, willing to die any way other than being mauled by a pack of wild dogs, the morning sun fully in our eyes, and as we began to run we heard a voice.

“Hey! Hey dudes! You OK?”

We spun.

Standing behind us was a shaggy-haired apparition, a gringo, tanned and quite tall and completely alone and speaking deeply inflected English betraying a southern Californian lineage.

“Hey man… I’m Yay. I mean, Jay. You guys look a little lost.”

Mark and I stared at him, and then each other, and then back at him.

“I would say you’re right about that, Jay. I’m Mark. This is Robbie. We’re lost, we’re out of gas, our transmission is broken, and we have three flat tires. What are the chances you have a phone?”

***

This, to be clear, is a true story.

***

As it turns out, Jay didn’t have a phone.

However, he was the advance mechanic for a team racing the Baja 500 and, on the outskirts of town, in an old cinderblock warehouse, had a fully equipped garage complete with air tools, a lift, a complete inventory of spare parts and fluids (and hundreds of gallons of gasoline) and happened to be a wizard at repairing flats, as he mended all three of our tires (and even rebalanced the spares on their rims).

He fixed the transmission.

He ducked out for a couple hours at one point as he was also the only guy in the region with a pilots’ license, and a plane, and after he took a short wave radio call he dashed out to locate a fisherman in distress before returning to us to continue to sort out the transmission.

He served us water, with ice cubes.

Mark and I, crushed by fatigue, did everything we could to make sense of this absurdly good luck.

Where we had literally been facing death in the Baja moments ago, we were now on a sofa, catching up with our new best friend and mechanic in one, Jay, who to top everything off was busy bleeding our brakes because he didn’t like the feel from the pedal.

And, after hours of work, he lowered the truck off of his lift and put away his tools.

We didn’t really know what to say.

“Um, what do we owe you?”

Jay would take no money from us (luckily, as we had none) but let it slip that he’d noticed the bourbon in the back seat.

We left him with sixty ounces of Jim Beam and 18 warm cans of Tecate, or roughly forty dollars in hooch.

In return, we got a full tank of gas, fresh brake lines, a repaired transmission, and three repaired and balanced tires, along with all the water we could drink.

Oh, and our lives.

I still have Jay’s card somewhere.

It was and remains (other than convincing Val to marry me) the single most extraordinary patch of good luck I have ever enjoyed.

 

[grogie]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and your adventure. I'll follow along on your web site.

 

[vicali]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and your adventure. I'll follow along on your web site.

agreed!

 

[nasko]

that, my friend was a great, great story. Really enjoyed reading it. Cheers

 

[nasko]

I just spent an hour or so going through your site. Great read, hats off to you and your family. Cheers

 

[redruby]

ENJOY YOUR TIME IN TUCSON, MY WIFE AND I WILL BE HEADING OUT IN MAY FOR ALASKA AGAIN FOR A LONG OVERDUE TRIP.

 

[bkrobbie]

Housing for the Indigent

I'll cross post this in the thread on tent camping, but we have a new home and we're pretty excited about it...

Many people considering serious overland travel have to address the following pressing issue: namely, what is the best tent to use in order to comfortably house up to ten Monster High dolls in complete comfort (including Gil Webber and Laguna Blue, who met in the back of our truck, and now may or may not be dating seriously).

​

​

My family and I have completely pushed the boundaries of our incredibly reliable Big Agnes King Creek 4, and the Arctic Storm that crushed New Mexico and Texas leading into Thanksgiving basically called our bluff. We simply could not camp in the Big Agnes in weather that bad, and we're pretty tough at this point (see: frozen water bottles, Shenandoah National Park).

​

​

Val and I have been debating roof top tent vs. ground tent for quite some time, and have got valuable input from folks who have both, and came to the conclusion that our needs, as a family, were best met by having a ground tent so that we could set up a base camp and, without having to strike, could take the truck to the trailhead / stunning feature of natural geography / ice cream shop without having to lift a blessed finger.

Moreover, roof top tents are heavy and big. We are trying to make this whole adventure of ours work in our short bed '05 Tacoma, Red Beauty, and putting a family sized roof top tent up top is a lot of weight and a lot of bulk, towering above our center of gravity.

And, roof top tents are expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars once you factor in our need for an awning / change room.

So, Red Beauty still covered in ice and snow, somewhere on I-10 just east of Deming, I called the folks at Family Tent Camping and had both Roger and subsequently Kim hold my hand and talk me through our situation and finally push me over the edge that an OZ Tent RV5 would be suitable for us.

It would, they promised, and not only that Kim swore to me that the tent would arrive at the house we had rented in Tucson before we were scheduled to depart, despite shipping over the Thanksgiving holiday.

A full two days early, as it turned out, as the FedEx guy pulled into our drive on Saturday with a mountain of boxes. With blue skies, an empty driveway, and a cool Narwhal Stout in hand, I dove onto the pile and loved them.

​

​

It was Christmas for this guy.

​

​

Now, long term impressions will be forthcoming, and I refuse to be one of those people who “review” a product with the shipping labels still attached them, but here's what I can say about the RV5 as it applies to me and my family:

• The thing really does set up in 30 seconds. Val dove in without the instructions, having only ever watched the video of the tent being sent up on YouTube, and had it erected. Was it staked and guyed out in 30 seconds? No, but you could have this thing up and running in inclement weather in 30 seconds and get the kids inside, then send whoever drew the short straw outside to complete the setup.
• The ventilation is phenomenal. We're in Tucson with plenty of sun, and the kids were OK playing inside the tent for a couple hours in the afternoon. No fly. Just had the windows open.
• The design / build quality is over the top. We care about this, disproportionately, because this is our home for the next year or two (or more). I have become an insane nitpicker about stitching, seams, design elements, and materials. I am really impressed with the tent, and I have been over it with a fine toothed comb over the past couple days.
• It will fit a family of four, of whom two just bought a couple of REI camp beds (the extra long, extra wide ones). We will experiment with various layouts and report back on what works best, but we're clearly going to fit.
• The awning is great. We have learned how important an awning is, and having a huge square awning that, importantly, is over six feet tall, will have a big impact on our comfort.
• We bought the OZ deluxe screen room to serve as a kids playroom / office / place to hide and that is a remarkable piece of equipment. Set up for us right now is a little inefficient and fiddly but we didn't have the instructions and the screen room really must be properly staked and guyed out to work. Once we got the thing up, we fell in love with it. Basically, bug-proof, weather proof, nice size, can set up awnings in any direction you want, you can pair it with the tent or have it off on its own. Height means you can stand up and change without hitting the roof. Just a guess, but I bet we use this thing far more than we expected to.

​

​

So, I have to solve some problems with regard to getting this thing affixed to the truck, but I have a couple ideas and don't see any issues I can't solve between a trip to Lowe's and charging up the batteries for my Makita cordless impact wrench. Will tupperware be involved?

Maybe, but if it is, it will look damn good.

 

[hrt4me]

thanks for your initial impressions/review of that OZ tent, it looks promising!

 

[bkrobbie]

Update time... South of Loreto

All -

It has been a while and we have been off the beaten path enough that getting a sound internet connection is tricky, and even when we do, download speeds are pretty anemic.

A lot of our journey has been written up on our blog, rovingbugs.com, but for those who don't frequent the site we've been down in Baja for a month now (we've entered twice, in fact, thanks to the unhappy convergence of a Tecate and our laptop) and have had just a fantastic time.

​

Right now we're just south of Loreto, making our way toward Agua Verde, and from there who knows.

Baja itself is a hell of a mistress - she's huge and unforgiving, and enormously beautiful. She keeps showing us things, sights, creatures and plants that are jaw dropping, and in such abundance it can sometimes be numbing.

​

At one point, camping just south of Ensenada, we had seen so many whales traveling past the front of our tent (itself perched on a cliff) that when (yet another) pod of greys came cruising past the site and I called them out, the girls took barely a moment to look up from their game to acknowledge them.

We spent a bunch of time in the interior, near Catavina, camping in total seclusion with another family for a week, basically moving on when the water ran out but not before hiking the hills, arroyos, and oases all around us and seeing cave art, boojum trees, cardons taller than telephone poles and, one exciting night, having our campsite evaluated by the local pack of coyotes (lesson: always keep the axe in the tent).

​

We've since spent time on the coast, primarily the Sea of Cortez, and have been kayaking, swimming, fishing, we've had mechanical problems, we've gotten hopelessly lost, we've argued, we've eaten clams harvested twenty minutes prior from the bay where we were camping, we've run out of money, but most importantly, we've made some very good friends and continue to be surprised at the kindness and generosity of people who, by rights, would be complete strangers to us.

​

It's been a great trip so far, and great for the girls.

I have to say that I do love the idea that their version of a "normal" day is to unzip the tent at dawn, let their eyes adjust to the sun as they absorb where they are (mountain, beach, forest, desert) and begin to cobble together a plan of action over a hot chocolate ("Hey Dad, you think we can try to catch some urchins today?" or "Should we go see if we can find the coyote tracks from last night?").

​

They're kids, so they have good days and bad days and days where they absolutely pine for home, but so do we, and I think the days where we are all together, seeing something that is absolutely new or breathtaking, more than outweigh the grey days.