Baja California Road Trip
One cold wintery day very early in our relationship, Jonathan projected a YouTube video of a beach onto our TV screen and we pretended we were on vacation. We stumbled across photos of Baja, California, and dreamed of being there.
Nineish months later, we crossed the border into Mexicali, on the Eastern side of the Baja peninsula. We had made it.
It was our first big adventure together, and we had just two weeks to do it, home-to-home. We packed Jonathan’s Toyota Tacoma to the brim and pointed it south. I named the truck Delfín, Spanish for dolphin, in hopes we might see her namesake on our trip. We didn’t, but I don’t blame the truck, and there were countless other magical moments to make up for it.
Watch the short travel recap video
We quickly learned that Baja is a land of extremes. It’s a giant desert framed by the Sea of Coréz on one side, the Pacific Ocean on the other. Everything is intense: the heat, the wind, the sand that can swallow a car. And emotions tend to mirror the environment they’re in. Our trip was a collection of moments of intense worry, discomfort, and anxiety punctuated by even more intense moments of bliss, satisfaction and relief. We probably worried more than we needed to, but wind has a way of blowing through your skin and into your psyche, and there was a lot of it in Baja.
Still, what we remember most are the moments of bliss. We remember how lucky we were to find our own private beach in Bahía de los Ángeles. We remember the bacon-wrapped shrimp and a dog named Lucy in Bahía de Concepción, and the sandy beaches that hosted us for two nights there. We remember the crystal-clear blue waters in Loreto, and how the sea lions welcomed us into their aquatic home, even played with us as we snorkeled around them. We especially remember the hot springs oasis where we spent Jonathan’s 30th birthday, in a private pool of natural spring water.