Checking In: Los Frailes
Hello All:
Checking in from a
dive shop in Cabo Pulmo, just north of a beach at Los Frailes where we have spent the past week enjoying our morning coffees as the local whale population frolics dramatically in the bay (as in, multiple, full breaches), floating in the ocean ourselves, snorkeling the reef and spotting parrot fish, wrasses, all kinds of puffers and blowfish and schools of angel fish and jacks, and, importantly, lazing about with
good friends we've had the fortune to make, and then continue to run into down here.
We had a real adventure coming south from
Agua Verde, resupplying in Ciudad Constitucion before heading into the interior mountains to try to
locate the ruins of the mission at Los Dolores.
From there, we made our way via the backcountry to the coast again, visiting San Evaristo before camping for just inside a week on an unnamed beach to the south without another soul in sight.
At La Paz, we stocked back up and restored body and mind with hot showers before moving south again past Las Barriles and down to Cabo Pulmo, and from there, to here, here being Los Frailes.
Along the way we celebrated not one but two birthdays, as our five year old became
six, and our seven year old became
eight.
They both had serious overland birthdays, complete with
cakes baked on open fires in a borrowed dutch oven (thank you a thousand times over to Alex and Ashek) and presents that Val had cleverly squirreled away in secret hiding spots in the truck months ago. Oh, and scorpions, and rattlesnakes.
And yesterday, we
snorkeled with a bunch of sea lions, and as an unplanned bonus, a couple of ten foot long bull sharks.
Thanks to the generosity of a young expatriate family we met here on the beach, we have the last serious equipment deficiency of ours, namely, the lack of a solar panel, about to be solved for - we're having a panel sent to them in San Jose del Cabo which we hope to pick up in a couple of weeks.
We were arguably nuts to do the trip without some kind of solar array, but truth be told in the five months we spent traveling prior to getting down here we legitimately never needed one, and given that they're not exactly cheap, it was an easy thing to forgo.
But the conditions down here are challenging our fridge and we're running our house battery down every four days or so, and the places are so lovely that we're staying longer and longer, so it just makes sense to cave in and get one.
Until it arrives, we plan to spend more time here on the beach, and early next week get ourselves over to the Pacific side of the peninsula in order for me to take some surfing lessons so I can finally, credibly, tell people that I know how to surf.
The girls are great, and having a great time, and all told it translates into my wife and I having a great time too. We keep meeting terrific and interesting people, and learning a ton about not just all these places we travel to, but ultimately, ourselves.
Which, of course, is the reason to do something like this in the first place.