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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.

Turkey sandwich featuring choice peppered turkey, pepperjack cheese, wheat bread, oil and vinegar . . . oh yeah, and fajita vegetables including jalepeno, onion, and bell pepper
This could be a column all of its own.  What do you do with left over food from camping or road trips?  I recall the days before owning a 12 volt refrigerator (um, that would be the Engel) that food gets pretty nasty sitting in a cooler of melted ice that's been riding in the truck bed on dusty roads.  You ever seen cheese that's been soaking in water?  It turns to this disgusting yellow mush blob.

Well, this time I got lucky with a pretty cool assortment of leftovers.

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Family meals while camping
Drive-thru cheeseburgers with french fries and milkshakes shouldn't be the norm when you're on a road trip with the kids.  In this article, Brooke shows four easy things to do to make tasty, healthy, and simple meals for the whole family when it comes to camping or picnicking along the way.

Put these tips to use so that you can be guilt free when you finally stop for pizza and beer on the way home form your next family road trip.

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So.  Yeah.

My old friends Russ and Andy dictate the Annual Adults Only Weekend in April.  They force us all to pass our spawns to the nearest grandparent willing to take them for a whole weekend, then we go drive some long, bumpy dirt road to a campsite.  We build a fire, fill the glasses, and talk about the old days and tell aggrandizingly sentimental stories about our children.

It might get loud.  It might get cold. We love it.  These are the pictures from our last outing in April 2009 that are suitable for the public.

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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.

Okay Internets. You got it. I never thought I'd let you do this to me; never thought you'd have this much control.

We tossed you the ball and you clobbered it out of the park.

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?

JPFreek Adventure Magazine Logo --- what's real? What's not?
I loaded up the Jeep with a backpack, a few vittles, a camera, and a GPS with the idea of landing myself in Guadalupe Mountains National Park for a number of days. This was my first solo trip in years, and preparing for it felt as foreign as walking on the moon. Just me and the Jeep, no family this time. 535 miles and four days. And somewhere out there at a campgound in the Chihuahuan Desert, a few friends awaited in a huddle around a campfire. They'd be waiting a while.

I didn't get there until 2:00 am. Strange things happened out there on the road.

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 . . .