I’m Thankful For La Paz And All My Blessings

11/20/11 – 11/28/11 La Paz: Well, Gina and I never made it to Wal-mart. We found a store called Chedraui that is something like a Fred Meyer. We thought we had died and gone to heaven.  They had a fabulous bakery department, but we couldn’t figure out how to ‘do’ the bakery department. Gina finally noticed that people we getting a big round tray from under a counter and some tongs and going around loading up their tray with various baked goods. So we did that, then you take your tray to this counter and a lady bags and prices your baked goods. We also found some small fake Christmas trees and garlands-yay! The only thing we couldn’t find was a real ham—only pressed cubes of pork, and some grey looking ham slices. I had decided that I would make an authentic Mexican dish for my contribution to Thanksgiving instead of ham, but the next day Gina found a ham in her travels, so we had a turkey breast, mashed potatoes and gravy, roasted veggies and pumpkin pie for the Phillips parts of the meal. I brought the ham, (fresh!) fried pineapple, stuffing, and Pioneer Woman’s Dreamy Apple Pie. It was a great feast, but boy was it hot outside (mid 80’s) and even hotter inside our boats with all that cooking going on. It was a nice day though. I was missing my family, but the Phillips’ are a surrogate family for us, and we can’t think of anyone we enjoy more.

Gina, Sydney and I have been keeping up with our early morning walks into town and along the Malecon. Sydney has befriended a dog that has been following us every day-even showing up right on time at the head of the dock. She named her Lexy, because Sydney feels she’s a fancy dog and needed a fancy name.

We’ve been anxious to attend the local farmer’s market that happens each Saturday and Tuesday so we could stock up on some local produce. There was also an arts and crafts market at one of the marinas, so Gina and went to both on Saturday (the 26th). The farmers market in town was a modest affair-only about 7 or 8 tables, and not much produce, but I did buy a blouse. The arts and crafts was also pretty small, but I found some earrings and a ring

Watching the weather has been a top priority this week. We want to cross the Sea of Cortez and head over to Puerto Vallarta because both boats have people to meet, and there’s supposed to be another norther this week. Well, it didn’t actually show up until Saturday, so we decided to leave on Tuesday (the 29th) after the wave action has a chance to flatten. We’ll probably stop in Los Muertos for one night (where Terry was injured in his encounter with the mystery sea creature a few weeks ago), and then head on across to Isla Isabel or San Blas and PV. Mazatlan will probably have to wait until we back come back up to the Sea of Cortez next Spring to wait out hurricane season.

Terry and went out to dinner last night (27th) to celebrate our 36th anniversary. We’ll be in the middle of the Sea of Cortez on our actual anniversary, so off we went to Rancho Viejo for food, then a nice walk downtown, and finally a cab home. Today (28th) Gina went and got produce and eggs and other goodies so we’re ready to leave La Paz tomorrow morning at about 7am. I’m ready to get away from the marina and get back in an anchorage again. I really do like La Paz though, and will look forward to coming back.

Learning In La Paz

11/14/11 – 11/19/11 In La Paz: This week has been very much a learning experience. It’s a simple fact that everything you want to do is more complicated in Mexico, but it’s vastly more so when you are in a new place in Mexico and trying to do things you haven’t done in Mexico yet. Case in point – getting Mexican cell phones up and running. After we bought sim cards for our phones, we needed to recharge them with money/minutes because the cards don’t come with much value. I went online and opened an account at Telcel, our Mexican cell service provider. That was easy enough. Then I recharged my sim card online using my ING debit card, again, not too difficult. I noticed however, that my phone didn’t immediately recharge with minutes, but thought, well this is Mexico. The charge on my ING account, however, went through immediately. A couple of hours later my cell phone rings and I notice the area code is 503 – Oregon. I answer and someone named Leslie starts asking me info in order to ‘verify my online Telcel purchase’. She says she’s from a company named Vesta and wants to know my SS# and some info about my ING account. I refused to give her any info because I didn’t know her from Adam. Then she says she will get an ING rep on the phone, and after a couple of moments someone calling himself Mohamed comes on and says he’s from the LA offices of ING (our bank). He then asks me the same questions and I again refused to answer, so my online Telcel transaction was cancelled. I wasn’t about to give sensitive bank info to someone I couldn’t positively identify. I emailed ING with the story and they said I had done the right thing. I did a little research and found out there is a company called Vesta that does verify online purchases for cell providers, and the Oregon # that called me pointed to Vesta when I googled it, so the whole thing was probably legit. Anyway, instead of doing it online, we found a local Telcel place, went in, paid in pesos and got more minutes, and it took about 5 minutes,so now all is good.

Then Gina and I want to a bank (a long hike) to change dollars to pesos, but didn’t bring our passports, so we couldn’t do it. I don’t remember having to have your passport to change money in Spain? Anyway, we got the job done eventually—the next day. After no joy at the bank, Gina and I went to the grocery store, Aramburo, which went well, except we wanted to pay in dollars since we hadn’t been able to get pesos. They would accept dollars, but not a hundred dollar bill, which was all I had, so I had to use my debit card, which they had to verify was not fraudulent, so that took a bit of effort, but we left the store with good groceries, and took a cab home. We had some trouble interpreting the meat labels, but I got a lot of produce and meat, including some chorizos which turned out to be very good! On a side note, they had a whole bin/case of frozen turkeys at that store—just like you would expect to see at a Safeway around Thanksgiving! This cute little Mexican woman stopped me to ask me about what size turkey she should buy.
She had her foil roasting pan and other holiday prep stuff in her cart. She was a crackup, and it was nice for me to be able to help a local here in La Paz for once.

We’ve had a couple of boat issues to deal with this week. After the storm last Sunday, we realized our battery charger had fried – probably a power surge, as we are hooked up to power at the dock. It’s a $300 – $400 item. Our friend Brian Wade is coming to Mexico on Nov 29th, so he’s bringing us another one. We have some gremlins in some of our lights – sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Then today (the 19th) Terry spent most of the morning changing the joker valves in both heads (toilets) and unplugging the vent line. It was not fun, as you might guess! They had needed it for some time, so we can check that off the list.

We’ve enjoyed walking around La Paz a lot. I really like this place. The weather is beautiful, the nights cool down a bit, which is nice, and it’s not nearly as touristy as Cabo. There are a lot of other cruisers who are always willing to give you the scoop on what you need to know. We’ve found some good places to eat, some interesting neighborhoods. The local people have been unfailingly kind and helpful. Gina and Sydney and I are taking long morning walks along the Malecon for exercise too. Life really is very very pleasant.

Gina and I are going shopping for Thanksgiving tomorrow after mass. I’m having trouble finding a ham, so we’re going to taxi to a Wal-Mart and see what they have. I have always hated Wal-Mart, so I’m hoping the Mexican ones are better? The Phillips family have spent many Thanksgivings with us, so it’s a bit of a tradition that I bring ham and fried pineapple and a pie, and Gina does a small turkey and pie too. We’re not sure exactly where we will be on Thanksgiving. Both boats need to get to Puerto Vallarta soon to meet various people who are flying in. The weather is always a bit iffy this time of year, and we have to cross the Sea of Cortez, which is a 200 mile passage. So the weather will dictate where we’ll be on turkey day! I will miss all my family then, and will be thinking of you ALL DAY. Have a good one!!!!

Life In The Sea of Cortez

11/13/11 in  La Paz: Yesterday (Saturday) was kind of a work day on the boat, but we only work for half the day because it just gets too hot! I defrosted my portable Engel freezer. It was easier than I expected; Terry gave me the dinghy pump (Kathy-remember Terry using that as a water cannon?) to suck the melted ice out of the bottom, but all I did was get water all over the settee. I couldn’t get the darn thing to hit the bucket I was using. Finally just used my turkey baster—much better. I also scrubbed the teak floors, and cleaned one of the heads. Terry washed the boat on the outside. It was caked with salt from our ‘norther’ adventure. So now all that’s left to clean is the other head, and to straighten up the disaster in our V-berth from everything stored in there tumbling down into one big heap—also a result of the aforementioned ‘norther’. I’ll do that ‘manana’, maybe. Then I was going to haul my 4 loads of laundry up the dock to the marina laundromat, but I couldn’t summon the energy. Besides, we had to move the boat to another slip in the afternoon because we found out we could pay half price if we rented the slip by the week, and the slip we were in was already spoken for. For half price and great internet, we’re staying in the marina for one more week. Love those marina showers too (except for that one dead cockroach I found in one)!

So after we got all settled in our slip, The Phillips family picked us up in a cab and we rolled into town to go have an early dinner. We went to a great place called Rancho Viejo. Terry and I had Mocajetes Arrachera. It’s flank steak cooked in a wonderful sauce and served in a Mocajete which is a sort of mortar and pestle made of lava rock, used in Mexico for centuries to grind their corn, etc. It was very very good. Later we stopped in a bar on the waterfront that had a trampoline which James and Sydney enjoyed while we had a nightcap.

Today (Sunday) was kind of a lazy day. I spent a good portion of it trying to find out what time the masses were at the Catedral Nuestra Senora de La Paz. Finally I found a Yahoo group for gringos in La Paz, joined it, asked for the info and got it! It was too late for any of the morning masses so I decided to go to the one at 5pm. Terry said he would dinghy me into town and then I could walk to the church. Well, it’s long dinghy ride to town, and then a long walk to the church, but we finally got there. We noticed a few drops of rain as we walked, but hey, this is La Paz, it almost never rains! Terry ended up going to mass with me and by the time it was over it was really raining! The wind had also picked up so we had a long, wet, windy and dark ride home in the dinghy. It was a bit scary too. We should have taken a cab--it would have been much safer and drier. Sometimes we aren’t very smart.

Cabo San Lucas To La Paz

11/06/11 in Cabo San Lucas: Finally we get to leave Cabo San Lucas! We headed to the fuel dock at 6:30am, got filled up with diesel and some gasoline for our generator. We were out of there by 7 and on our way to La Paz. Cabo is on the very tip of Baja California, the long peninsula that runs down the west side of Mexico. La Paz is around and up into the inside of the peninsula in the Sea of Cortez, sometimes called the Gulf of California. We plan, for now, to go to La Paz and stay for awhile and then figure out our next step from there. I am so glad we now get to go where we want, when we want. Now our actual cruising life begins. We have heard the weather reports of a ‘norther’ with high winds and steep seas beginning Monday or Tuesday, so we will only go part way to La Paz and pull in somewhere that is protected. We motored for 45 miles or so and pulled into a nice sized bay called Los Freiles—The Friars. I love this place. There’s no town, only a beach and some fishermen’s shacks. Since we have no prop for our dinghy, we went to the beach with the Phillips’ and poked around for awhile. We found some rocks and tide pools where there were hundreds of dark brown small crabs jumping from rock to rock. I’ve never seen a crab jump before—very cool. The best thing about this place though is the isolation and the quiet. Such peace here. It’s very soothing and wonderful to just sit and look around. We had looked forward to doing some snorkeling and taking a hike here and exploring. But we’ll have to wait because of the weather. We plan to leave tomorrow morning.

11/07/11 in Los Freiles: We left this little spot at about 7am. I was sad to go because it was so beautiful and I don’t think we finished doing all we could do there, but the weather is supposed to get worse before it gets better and we want to get to La Paz. The seas were a bit choppy, wind on the nose about 15-20 knots, but lots of sun, so we got naked and soaked up the rays as we travelled. We tried sailing, but with the wind on the nose we weren’t too successful. So then we experimented with a sailing concept called “velocity made good”, which is a bit complicated but has to do with trying to make the most distance with the wind on the nose by tacking back and forth and keeping the wind more off the beam so as to make forward progress. At some point the extra distance you go by always tacking chews up any additional benefit you get by sailing more off the wind. We need to understand it more, but it was a start. We travelled about 47 miles and pulled into a place called Ensenada Los Muertos (Ensenada of the dead!). There’s no town here, only a very small luxury hotel and golf course on the west side of the bay, a small church on the hill, a cantina on the east side of the bay and a huge empty white beach with a bunch of fishing pangas in between (a panga is a Mexican boat-there must be millions of them in Mexico) . The mountains off to the west are spectacular—high desolate and intimidating. We got anchored and settled in by about 3 pm, had sundowners (cocktails on boats—the happy hour!) bbq’d the fresh tuna the fisherman in Cabo gave us, and settled in for the night. I’m a happy camper to be somewhere tucked in behind a bluff with the wind supposed to get pretty nasty tonight and all of tomorrow.

11/08/11 in Ensenada Los Muertos: Today was a mixed bag. After doing a few chores on the boat in the morning, Rick invited us to go ashore with the family for some beach time and lunch at the cantina. The cantina is named 1535 (don’t ask me why) and is a nice large airy place with tile floors, tables for dining, a few grouping of couches and chairs for lounging, a bar, and they serve nice meals. You can also hook into their wifi which we had planned on doing and brought both computers. Terry got online right away, but it took me forever, and the connection was very slow. I finally got on Facebook and posted a quick update. Then Lisa came on and we chatted for a bit! Then we had lunch there—not cheap. I keep looking for all this fabulous and cheap food in Mexico, but so far no luck. After lunch we went to the beach, and after some confusion, Terry, Rick and I decided to move the dinghy further down the beach to be closer to where the kids were going to snorkel. As we were pushing the dinghy into the water, Terry got stung by some sea creature of some kind on his foot and was in a lot of pain, and it was bleeding quite a bit. So Rick took us back to our boat and I started reading our medical guide about what to do. It was difficult because we don’t really know what got him. The first thing we did was soak his foot in vinegar to sanitize and mitigate the venom somewhat. Then we soaked his foot in as hot of water as he could stand. That really helped his pain. After doing a lot of reading we are guessing he stepped on a sea urchin. I noticed that Sydney had found a dead one on the beach earlier, and the symptoms and description of the wound fit the best of anything I could find. There is no town of any kind here, and if his wound started looking worse I was prepared to hire a local person to drive us to La Paz or the closest doctor. He did the hot water thing for 90 minutes and the pain had lessoned and he had no other symptoms of any kind. So the only thing to watch for now is infection. And we also can’t tell if there is maybe part of a spine from what got him still in his foot. Poor Terry, first he pulled his hamstring very badly in Avalon and now this. He was pretty bummed. By the end of the day his foot was looking much better, so I think the worst is over. No more going barefoot in the rocky shallows on the beaches!

11/09/11 in Ensenada Los Muertos: Woke up today feeling good after sleeping very hard, even though we had a rolley night onboard. Terry’s foot looks good, and he feels fine, so unless some sort of infection develops, he will live! We have cheated Los Muertos!

We didn’t go ashore today, we took care of boat chores instead. I did two bucket loads of laundry out on the poop deck. The winds are very strong (+20 knots) because of the ‘norther’ blowing down the Sea of Cortez. We are quite sheltered in Los Muertos, as it’s supposed to be blowing +30 knots outside of here. The sun’s still shining though, so there I was hanging laundry to dry, hoping it doesn’t blow off the boat. I also made bread today!!!! I bought a fantastic book called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. Basically the strategy is that you make a very WET yeast bread dough, let it rise for two hours, then store in your fridge for up to two weeks. You never have to do any kneading. When you want fresh bread, you tear off a grapefruit sized chunk, ‘cloak’ it (1 minute), let it rest for 40 minutes, then bake at 450 for about half an hour. The bread comes out beautifully, with a nice crispy crust, and all chewy on the inside. The longer you keep it in your fridge, the better the flavor is—kind of like sourdough. The book has all kinds of variations on the basic recipe. I highly recommend it.

Because the winds in the Sea of Cortez are supposed to die down by tomorrow mid-morning, we are planning to leave tomorrow and see if we can get to La Paz, which is about 58 miles from here. If the seas are too rough, we’ll stop somewhere. There are several little places we can hole up in between here and La Paz.

 

11/10/11 in Ensenada Los Muertos: Up bright and early, pulled up the anchor and were on our way by 7am. As we left I went up to the cockpit to see what the sea state was. Winds seemed fairly light and the waves were manageable, so I went down below to cook breakfast. What a joke! I no sooner got in the middle of cooking up eggs and chorizos (our last ones from Boise ) when all of a sudden I felt like I was trying to cook in a washing machine. Confused lumpy seas, winds picking up, Harmony bashing through the mess, and I’m down below hanging on by my fingernails. I did manage to finish breakfast, but the dishes had to wait. The rest of the day was not any better. We had 20 knot winds on the nose the whole day and waves like boxcars. We got our butts kicked by those massive waves. It took us 10 hours to travel about 45 miles and we were exhausted by the time we reached Caleta Lobos, where we anchored up for the night. We should have waited one more day before leaving Muertos, but live and learn!

Caleta Lobos is small, empty and peaceful. The full moon rose in the stillness of the evening and once again all was good in our little world.

11/11/11 in Caleta Lobos: Up early, pulled the anchor and headed the12 miles to La Paz. Flat seas and sunshine have restored our humor. We got a slip for a couple of days at Marina Palmira. Internet!!! It’s slow and I get kicked off all the time, but it works. As soon as we got in, we took a cab to Lopez Marine to see if they had a propeller for our dinghy. No luck there, but the guy told us where the Yamaha shop was, so we hopped in another taxi. We had a great time there trying to talk to the three women at that place, but they had a prop for us, and $143.00 later we left, after smiles and laughter all around. Nice people. We decided to walk for a bit, and ended up walking clear back to the waterfront, which must have been 3 miles or so. On the way I spotted a Mextel store, so in we went to buy sim cards for our cell phones. They do things very differently in Mexico. The store was lined with bank teller-like windows, I’d say 15 of them. We had to get a ‘little paper’ they called it and then get in line. All these employees working, but no one actually getting anything done. It’s amazing. The red tape!! We waited in line for 30 minutes or so, and finally got our turn. We had everything but our passports with us, so now we have to go back so our sim cards can be activated. Who knew you need your passport to buy a sim card with cell phone minutes? That was all we got done today. Tomorrow laundry, back to the cell phone store, defrost the freezers, and maybe some grocery shopping. Or maybe not.