We hated to leave La Paz but the hotel bill, even with the discount rate, was mounting and the kids had stories they wanted to tell their dad and their friends back in Los Angeles. So we packed our frozen fish in a cooler and headed north again, a prospect made more pleasant by the thought of re-visiting the towns we'd stopped at on the way down.
There was much excitement about the first night's stop in Loreto, because of that great pool, but the La Pinta inn there was booked -- which turned out to be a happy circumstance in the end because it drove us to the Hotel Oasis, which was wondrous:
A great bar where the kids were welcome to hang out, playing darts and pool, a great seaside restaurant, hammocks strung up between the palm trees and on the porches. Nora took advantage of one of them to finish the magical book Half Magic:
On subsequent days, San Ignacio and Catavina proved to be every bit as charming as we remembered them. There was even a horse grazing outside our rooms this time at the La Pinta in San Ignacio:
But we made a fatal miscalculation at the end of the journey. We decided to drive north of Ensenada and stay at Rosarito, and then take the toll roads across to Tecate, to save some time.
It was fun to drive by the Fox studio outside Rosarito, where Titanic was filmed, but the town itself was a nightmare of traffic and hustlers and tourists. We stayed at a bland motel, whose only advantage was that it was across the street from a famous old restaurant specializing in carnitas, slow-roasted pork, which we hadn't run into often in Baja California (it's not a specialty of the region.) The carnitas was good, and so was a shrine near the restrooms to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe:
Driving the next day proved to be a nightmare. The toll road north was fine and fast, but there were no signs for the turn-off to the toll road to Tecate and we got lost in the shabby maze of a Tijuana suburb. Between the hideous condos on the coast and the wretched poverty of Tijuana, we felt as though we'd entered another country. It made me think of the old saying -- "Poor Mexico! So far from God, so near to the United States of America!" Things in this part of Mexico are probably just going to get worse in the years ahead, and I don't think the condo-sized Jesus, below, is going to help much.
We eventually made it to Tecate, where we waited for over an hour in a long line of cars to cross the border. The crossing itself was a breeze. The U. S. guard, who spoke English with a Spanish accent, asked us a few questions then waved us through -- and suddenly it was all over. We were back in the States.
All that was left was to miss Mexico -- something I haven't stopped doing since.
For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.
[Photos © 2007 Lloyd Fonvielle & Harry Rossi]