San Quintin

We moved south about 130 miles today to a place we planned to stay last winter, but never made it. We almost skipped it again this year because as we passed through the town of San Quintin the wind was blowing at least 30 mph off the ocean, and the entire town and surrounding area were enveloped in swirling dust. At one point we slowed the truck to 15 miles per hour because we couldn’t see the road ahead. But as we left town the dust seemed to diminish a bit, and at the last minute we decided to drive one mile west of Mex 1 to the campground to check it out as a possible destination in the future. (Check out our location using the “where we are, where we’ve been” link on the right to see on Google maps)

Once at the beach, the dust was gone (it was all inland) and there was a great windbreak of low trees at the campground so that once parked, we could sit outside and were actually hot – the temperature was 83 degrees. We decided to stay. After settling in, we went on a beach walk for an hour. On our return, we noticed there was a truck and Mexican couple at the “office”, so went to inquire about paying for our stay. The fee was only 130 pesos ($10), and we spent the next 30 minutes conversing in Spanish with 76-year-old Guadalupe, the friendliest guy you could ever hope to meet. He promised to await our return in March “if I’m not dead, as I’m very old” (said with a huge smile on his face). Cathryn finds it of interest that though Bob has never studied Spanish, and speaks it not at all, he’s able to understand conversations in Spanish if the speed of speech is sufficiently slow, as is required for her to converse. We presume this speaks to the relative ease of moving from one Latin-based language to another. After saying goodbye to Guadalupe, we spent the rest of the afternoon reading and enjoying the sun glistening off the Pacific Ocean with pelicans fishing, as is usual here.

We have the campground to ourselves, as we did last night, so everybody else must have been deterred by the dust storm – their loss.