ODO: 305,445
Now that we had a surfboard again, we decided to check out Cerritos for a few days, where we ran into our Canadian friends again. We spent our days being humbled by the surf, swimming, and watching whales jump. At night we sat around the mini solo stove swapping travel tips, stories, and learning about tugboat life.
After three days, our friends had to start heading north, so we headed up to Todos Santos for mega nachos and a baby turtle release. The steak nachos from Casa Todos were no joke. So many toppings layered throughout, and the steak was fantastic. Walking around town afterwards, we came up with an idea for our first on-the-road-truck-textile project! Some custom weavings are in our not too distant future….
Still very full of nachos, we headed to the beach to wait for sunset and baby turtles. Because of all the traffic and predators on the beaches, volunteers collect all the turtle nests they can find, keeping them safe until they hatch in a makeshift greenhouse-looking tent on the beach. Every evening until March they release all the turtles that hatched that day. They release them 20-ish feet from the water so they know this is the beach they come back to when its their time to lay eggs. Its extremely adorable watching them flop their way to the water, and really sad watching them get tumbled around in the surf before finally making it out to sea. In total, we watched 116 Olive Ridley sea turtles make their way into the world as the sun set.
Now, to head up into the hills to camp so we dont have to get up as early for the race in the morning. Did we mention Berne found racing? The owner of Shaka’s was racing his motorcycle in the Cabo 250, and we offered to help him with his pit. We aren’t doing a great job of slowing down. After setting up camp a short distance from the pit, we tried a new spice on our dinner meat. It didn’t go well. It came out much, much too salty. Our dessert was a bust too, we had purchased homemade chocolates a few days earlier, and they tasted like soap. We were moo’d to sleep by the heard of cows that settled in around us, and yipped awake by coyotes.
Race day! We were up at 6:15am to pack up and drive back to where we would be helping pit. The first lap went well, they were off to a strong start, but 50 miles into the second, and final lap, they got a flat tire and had to limp it home on the wheel. There was no shortage of drama in this small race, including a team running a welder with a generator that was not quite powerful enough so they bypassed the governor and were manually running the throttle to try to squeak a little more power out of it, and some spectators running over another spectator as they tried to leave.
The drive home from the race was more eventful than the race itself. We drove through a sandy arroyo to get back, and came across two trucks stuck in the soft, wet sand. Berne loves a good recovery, and immediately pulled over to ask if they needed help. The first truck had been stuck since 8am, on their way to watch the race and the second truck got stuck when they stopped on their way home from the race to help the first truck. Some tires aired down to 10 PSI and a little winching recovered both vehicles pretty quickly. Both drivers were very grateful, and promised to buy us dinner when we all got back to town.
Four miles further down the wash we came across two more trucks stuck much worse than the first two. A couple hours later, after some creative maneuvering, winching plus yank strap, and getting ourselves stuck once, we were able to recover both of those trucks also. This family was also very grateful, they thought they were going to have to spend the night in the arroyo. After exchanging information, and promises of a future fishing trip, dinner, and use of a race shop, everyone was safely headed back to the highway.
Hot, sweaty, and filthy, we headed back to Shaka’s to collect our dinner. Dinner turned into an offer of a place to stay and a warm shower (which we desperately needed after the day we had), so we headed off to Casa Del Perro, which turned out to be an under construction beachfront retreat. We were also treated to breakfast in the morning, and a hose and place to clean up the winch rope and the yank strap before we headed off to Nine Palms to try the surf there for a few days.
