These kids hardly need language at all - what with there being these totally awesome digging toys for the sand.  Even though Samantha once complained to me that, "I can't understand her.  She talks weird" about this little Mexican girl. Sam is only seven years old, so this turned into a teaching moment.

108 Pictures

The rocks, sand, and wild desert vegetation of the Baja pensinsula made up the backdrop for our family road adventure this summer. Greg and I can take partial credit for this successful vacation, having hatched out the whole plan out around a campfire last November. "We've got to get the cousins out on a really cool trip this summer," I implored. "Are you up for something?"

We settled on Baja, pleaded with Mark to go along with it (he quickly agreed), and 6 months later, with fresh passports in hand, we made the trek down. While the trip was Greg's and my idea, Mark was definitely the driving force behind the success of our 2 weeks. He planned a great route and was our group's main Spanish speaker. Baja gave our family the perfect balance of adventure on and off the beaten path. We enjoyed the food, the culture, and the views from every mountain and beach we explored on the way.

Old memories of adventure travel in Mexico emerge during a bedtime story with Chloe.  It's no lie.

Coming at you live-ish from the Baja peninsula... which is a very good reason why you haven't seen any updates in over a week.  It's been super tough. Shrimp tacos and off-the-grid beaches on Mexico's most notoriously fun strip of sand and rock are keeping us really "busy."

Pardon some of the funky keystrokes on my part because they have keyboards here that do stuff like this ñ and this ¿ by just hiting the wrong key.

So, back to Mexico. Baja.

The other day we - Brooke, Chloe, me, Greg, and Samantha - were enduring a brutal morning on the beach south of Mulegè.  Some coffee, some huevos rancheros, and a gentle tide at about 90 degrees F.  A clunky old Ford pickup stopped next to our palapa and a thick and muscular Mexican man spoke a hilarious version of Spanglish through which he offered us an hour-long boat ride for $25.

He claimed he'd show us a sunken boat that's since been taken over by the sea as a reef.  He also suggested he'd take us to a nice point where we'd get some fresh clams from the bottom of the Sea of Cortès and swallow them down right there.  "Bring limes and salsa, I bring mi panga over here in one two or three horas."  He told us in his peculiar, yet admirable, dialect of Spanglish.

Get out your map and look up Bahía Concepción; it's about 2/3rds the way down Baja on the Sea of Cortés side. Here goes a minute of your day from our little boat on the sea.

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We could have just driven down to any one of six or seven strip malls and found a Bed Bath and Beyond or something. But we wanted to buy something handcrafted and imperfect.  So we loaded the bikes and headed down the road for a two-day-and-three-night back road adventure through Tucson, Sonoita, Patagonia, and Nogales . . . just to buy a set of colorful mexican glasses and margarita pitcher south of the border. Chloe was learning to walk.  Labor Day 2008.

Our camp right on the edge of the beach north of town - Bahia de Los Angeles
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In search of the beautiful beaches enjoyed with the finest margaritas and the greasiest tacos that the Thousand-Mile-Peninsula has to offer.  And with a 6-months pregnant chick along for the ride, too.

If a little siesta or a hot-blooded revolution doesn't fix your wounds, then a potent swill of tequila gets the job done.

Chloe, who is now two-and-a-half years old, has the Ludwig Bemelmans book Madeline (website).  She likes me to read it to her at night before bedtime.

I mentioned she's two-and-a-half years old, right?  Yeah, so she'll hardly sit still through three pages before she'll say, "I WANT SOME MIWK" and that's aside from her squirming and wiggling around looking for the "cortner" of her purple blankey to swish against her nose.

To keep her on task, I've dug deep into my training as an English Major and pulled out this technique perfected by poets and jazz drummers alike: the caesura.  My instructor at ASU admitted that she just liked the way the word sounded as it slid from her mouth.

Let me illustrate how I exploit caesura as I read to Chloe.  The first lines from Madeline:

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,
lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

In two straight lines they broke their bread,
and brushed their teeth, <caesura>

I wait for Chloe. As she sits on my lap I can see the side of her chubby cheek rise from a smile. "and went to BED!" she finishes for me.

If I just pause and let her finish off a random rhyme here or there, she'll pay more attention and maybe stop her squirming.

Toward the end of the book there's a page with an open air bus, [SPOILER ALERT] 11 of the girls are riding it to go see Madeline who just so happens to be in the hospital with appendicitis.

And one night last week Chloe pointed at the bus and asked, "Are dey widen da bus?"

"Yes, the are.  Where do you think they're going?"

"Are dey goin to Mexico?"

Did you notice that Chloe's geography skills are a little poor? Riding a bus from Paris to Mexico?  I doubt it.  But she seems to know where the fun places are.

She hit a soft spot with me. 10 years ago this June, I had a friend drive me and two other friends to Mexicali where he dropped us off with our backpacks, and we boarded a bus bound for Baja. We traveled down the peninsula, over to Mainland, down the Pacific coast and worked our way home through Copper Canyon after some three weeks.  "I think so." I said.  "Do you want to ride the bus in Mexico with Papa?"

"Mm-hmm.  Can Mama come too?"

***

Tomorrow, we're going to load up into the truck and drive down to Sierra Pinacate Biosphere Reserve in Sonora, Mexico.  We'll camp in the broad, wild desert and locate a quiet beach camp.  We'll cook fresh shrimp fajitas and wake up to the whispering tide.  We'll talk about taking a bus trip through Mexico, too.

For fun, here are two pictures from Chloe's first trip to Mexico when she was seven weeks old.  The Mexican ladies down there had a ball with her:

Just look at that little face...
They've got nice hats, huh?

You're going to find me despicable. This, my confession, is supposed to be a preemptive measure so The Universe goes easy on the Karma tomorrow.

When I picked up Chloe from her GiGi tonight, Chloe didn't want to go. Naturally.  She's two-and-a-half.  NO NO NO NO is her trademark phrase for me.  I have my devices to deal with this.

Maybe it was foolishness, but it was like we wanted to set things straight with Chloe even before she was born.  Just 6 months into the whole bun-baking thing they call pregnancy, Brooke and I drove down the Baja peninsula with my parents.  We camped on lonesome beaches, ate like we didn't deserve it, toured 17th Century missions built from stone, got up close and personal with giant gray whales in Laguna Ojo de Liebre --- your standard Baja adventure stuff. Mexico being what it is brought us a number of other adventures we couldn't have fabricated. Like the exploding transmission in the Range Rover . . .

Nissan Sport Magazine Summer 2009 Issue
Yeah, right, like it would ever occur to my white, middle-class mind that a map, for God's sake, could be wrong. Oh, but it was. Nissan Sport Magazine published the story in their Summer 2009 issue.