Fog!

Once a year we got fog in the Keys. Inevitably I would be working and the only fog pictures I could post would be commuting shots of lamps looking film noir shrouded in mist. 

Monday morning Rusty started yawning at 6:15 and by the time he and I were out of GANNET2 the dawn still hadn’t broken properly. 

I wore my serape and socks under my Crocs. I put on the splendid gloves I bought at Wally World in Benson on Bruce’s sage advice and with my watch cap on I was equipped. Rusty wire his collar. We went for a walk. Our chairs and sand mats were wet.

Packing them up to go into town was going to be a chore. 

A Mexican family with a Nissan Altima was here the day before. We saw the car leave but they left their weekend camp behind. 

The desert mountains in the distance are invisible. 

Even the locals looked grumpy: 

Home sweet home and a cup of tea. 

Some pictures: 

To keep things in perspective Bruce sent me a picture of snow on his porch in Southern Arizona. As he put it we escaped the Great Blizzard. 

Up north the snow melted and down here the fog lifted. 

San Carlos, Sonora

San Carlos is a prosperous boomtown on the shores of the Sea of Cortez with a population of 2500 Mexicans and a revolving group of Canadians and Americans over wintering.  If you are looking for an authentic Mexican experience this isn’t it. For a vacationer or a winter snowbird San Carlos is ready for you. 

English is spoken here and you will see busy gringos running around town trying to look at ease in a tourist town. It’s a similar attitude to the way some people want to look  cool in Key West and be part of the scene.  

Dining out is a popular hobby along the waterfront.

In the heat of summer we spent a couple of nights at the Totonaka campground to get ready to cross the border.   We stopped here in June last year as  it was desert hot already, too hot for comfort in our van without continuous air conditioning and they have full modern American style outlets. Now the place is packed with RVs hooked up for the winter. I’m told last Saturday they had room for three RVs to be packed in. Not everyone enjoys Mexico as we do. You can do it your way. 

We are wild camping further down the beach behind the little strip of sand you can see below. It’s ten minutes away by car and fifteen by bicycle if you need to come to town for supplies. No hookups. 

The town sprawls around the coast with resorts and marinas and gated communities catering to foreign visitors and investors but the four lane waterfront is the commercial hub. My wife’s hair stylist said she lives in Guaymas, the port city around the bay. It’s too expensive in San Carlos where foreigners are buying property. We’ve heard that story before.  

There is construction underway all the time in San Carlos. Tucson is 300 miles north on a modern four lane highway. To visit San Carlos you need a tourist card and Mexican car insurance both obtainable online. There is no requirement to get a vehicle import permit so the six hour drive requires one quick stop at immigration to get the tourist card stamped and you are on the beach in Mexico. No wonder it’s so popular. 

I read about the murders in Monterey Park and the school kids killed in the mid west. Here campers leave their gear outside, on the beach, overnight, untouched. 

Layne stopped here to buy some medications for her tooth implants. They have a sign in the pharmacy offering a long list of drugs including narcotics, no prescriptions required. 

I got my teeth cleaned at the “American Dental” office. I gave the receptionist who is fluent in English my name and phone number. Dr Juan led me to the chair and did the cleaning. $55 on my American Express no forms to fill and no disclaimers or promises not to sue. You want freedom? Mexico will put that desire to the test. 

In Mexico you are responsible for yourself. There are no guarantees  or armies of lawyers to cater to your sense of injustice. No one owes you anything. You can give it a shot but if it doesn’t work out it’s on you. Whatever it is. Some days it’s scary, others it’s annoying and some  it’s exhilarating. It’s possible to sleepwalk through life in Mexico but as an American tourist it’s not very easy to ignore the possibilities. 

For us the draw is the free camping in the wilderness that could be closed off for development at any time. San Carlos is convenient and Guaymas has Walmart and Sam’s Club and Autozone and Home Depot when you need them. But the beach is the draw. Park where you like. 

It gets muddy in the rain and noisy on Saturdays when families picnic with competing music. You have to accept a certain level of trash along with your isolation. 

At night the town twinkles across the bay. 

At our end of the beach we have one condo development and a few lights. 

I’d rather be here than Quartzsite if I were looking for an inexpensive winter home in my RV but fortunately most snowbirds seem to prefer sitting in the Arizona dust bowl. This wild camp could easily be over filled if they only knew.

On The Beach

Wednesday morning the 18th we left Sierra Vista Arizona amid snow flurries and Friday afternoon I went for a swim in the Sea of Cortez.  It wasn’t a hot tub but I got past the icy stage and I swam and came out fifteen minutes later tingling. Layne stayed with GANNET2 while Rusty trotted between us worried which side of the sand dune he should be guarding. 

Ron from Iowa and his brother Terry led the way into the frigid waters but no one else was swimming, perhaps we all had a point to make, we were glad to be here. I like this wild camp a lot but Layne is looking longingly at Tenacatita Bay south of Mazatlan where the temperatures are ten degrees higher, 80 by day and sixty by night. I suspect a move is in my future. 

It doesn’t much matter I suppose. Ron who is self employed and almost retired has plans to fly to Colombia leaving his van in storage here for a month. His brother has gone home after a two week vacation in a tent here, riding an overnight bus to Phoenix and then a plane to Iowa where it is quite warm he says, two inches of snow and around freezing. He isn’t retired. The two “boys” encouraged their parents to come here a few years back and now every winter starts with an Iowa family campground on the beach in Mexico. Hello neighbor! There are lots of different ways to enjoy the beach. 

They had a spaghetti dinner around the fire our first night. It was perfect timing to get invited to plow into a huge pot of delicious bolognese. 

Is Mexico dangerous? 

Why would that question even come up? Because three people rode by our camp on bicycles from their condo rental and paused to express astonishment that we were wild camping by ourselves. We are not by any means the only people doing that here.  I was slouched in my camp chair reading, the epitome of a victim of violent crime but I tried to reassure them of my safety. A single woman on the beach, unmolested, for example: 

Now that the border entry shambles is behind us we have up to 180 days wandering Mexico ahead of us. In mid April Layne will need to return to Algodones, the border town where she will have her two implants installed. Our plan is to be near Cancun at that point and for her to fly back for the appointment leaving me with Rusty to prepare for our crossing to Belize.  Until then we will zig zag south. Our goal is Panama by June to ship the van to Colombia. 

All that sounds terribly busy. Right now we watch the sun set after another day of not very much. It’s cool enough we haven’t even deployed our Moonshade awning. We are enjoying the winter sun. 

One annoyance has been the number of flies. I may have to get energetic and put up the mosquito netting. That’s the extent of my ambition. 

We have appointments to get my  teeth cleaned and to have Laynes’s hair cut so we will pack up and drive into town one day. Layne also has fish tacos on her mind. It is a torpid sort of life. 

Pete and Shelly from Alberta got stuck briefly in soft sand. They have two energetic dogs and a long handled shovel but I wandered over to their RV with my entrenching tool and helped move a little sand…

…The hole they dug is where Rusty is inspecting the sand. It was more as a gesture of solidarity as they are quite self sufficient. Rusty stayed clear at the time as his presence excited the Canadian dogs inside the RV which shook to their barking.  “RV gets stuck briefly” was the headline that day. I went back to my book.

It’s not a long read, more like a scholarly text written in a rather stilted  style reminiscent occasionally of someone not conversant with idiomatic English, but I am enjoying learning about the stories behind the names -Francisco Madero, Huerta, Carranza, Obrégon and Porfirio Diaz among others- honored on street signs and in city names. It’s an easy read surprisingly. 

Well, that should keep the mind busy as we vegetate in the shrubbery.