We had a nice Christmas at home in Poway. Due to the lack of car space, we were unable to take the whole clan down to Baja. Cathy decided to remain at home with her mom and daughters, while a person whose name is not worthy of posting on this site (Dmitria's ex-bf) and I headed down to the campo. We had loaded up the day before, so we were ready to hit the road at 8 AM on the day after Christmas. We crossed the border into Mexicali and got into San Felipe about 12:30. After gassing-up, icing-up, beering-up and tequilaing-up, we headed down the road to Puertecitos. The road hasn't undergone much more repair than it had when we were down in mid-October. It was good down to about Campo Cadena, but after there, potholes predominated. A few good stretches thereafter escaped destruction by Hurricane Nora on September 20,1997, but other than that, the road is a mess. Travel time is about 1.5 hour to Puertecitos. For those of you who have never seen it, Puertecitos is a rather bleak, squalid little town. Few plants in sight. Trash strewn about. I'm not fond of it...can you tell? A good thing about it is this little market that has good hot sauce and produce, usually. We got 2 liters of Pacifico, 3 big Hass avocados, a mess of limes and a couple cans of hot sauce for $4. Can't beat that. Here's the scene from where we usually park. It's actually lighter in the store at night than in the day. The electricity in the town is only turned-on in the early morning and at night. It's a panorama, so scroll right.
I purged the nameless one's images from this site. In deference to the fish and dolphins, many pictures remain, but have been retouched and/or altered.
This view looks southeast toward the bay. You can see the end of the pavement here. South of Puertecitos, it's shake, rattle and roll for the next 38 miles.
The first 20 miles involves crossing what Roger used to call the Three Sisters. In any case, you wind your way through a mountain range that goes essentially right down to the water's edge. At about the 18 mile point south of Puertecitos, you cross what I call Huerfanito Ridge. You'll not want to go off the west side of the road here: it's a long, steep way down into a massive wash, several hundred feet below. This view looks north from a favorite vantage point.
South of here, the view of the Enchanted Islands (Las Encantadas) is pretty durn spectacular. It's another panoramic view, so scroll right.
The road here heads off to the south. It's about 2 miles to Huerfanito Grade, one of the nastier spots in the road. If you look hard where the water hits the land off to the right, you can see the road cutting across the flats south of the Grade. The island to the right is El Huerfanito (the Orphan). It kinda sits off by itself (hence the name). The middle island in this picture is Isla San Luis. Our casa is directly onshore from it. To make things easy, I've broken down the trip to 4 phases. You can navigate from here,
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merry wanderer numero
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