Big Trip Day 389: Dog Fart Mansion
Hi friends!
It’s February now, and it feels a lot like America is imploding, so I’d like to bring your mind back to happier times — December 31 2024, the eve of the new year, a time when we knew Trump was coming but he hadn’t come yet, and when Justin and I were meeting up with friends (yes, friends!) on the Mexican mainland.
We had originally planned to travel to the mainland as a part of our extended road trip, taking the overnight car ferry from Pichilingue, Baja Sur, to Los Mochis, Sinaloa. From there, it’d be a day and a half of driving south to Punta Mita, where we were meeting friends for New Year’s.
When we hatched the plan for this side quest, we were both imagining the car ferries we used back in Indonesia. As an island nation, Indo loves a ferry, and most islands host a nearly endless number of boat options of all speeds, destinations, and price points. Want to spend three days sleeping on a bare metal plate for $2, going from Bali to Flores? Great! Bring your scooter, it’s only $5 more! Want to spend one seasickness-inducing hour rocketing across the strait between Gili T and Denpasar in a fast boat for $80? Also great! We’ve got it all!
Like idiots, we assumed that the Mexican ferry would be similarly affordable — I mean really, how much could it possibly cost to get the Impreza to the mainland and back? $100? Nope! Surprise, the correct answer is almost $1000 roundtrip, which is probably a little more than the Blue Book value of the vehicle at this point. So Justin engaged his flight booking galaxy brain and found us four independent one-way tickets that, in combination, got us to and from Punta Mita for a couple hundred dollars. Not the original plan, but hey — not everywhere can be Indonesia.
We were in Punta Mita in support of perhaps the decade’s greatest surprise party: for our friend Keith’s 40th, his wife Sarah masterminded a multi-part surprise surf trip in Mexico. In order, the surprises were: going on a trip at all, going on a surf trip to Mexico, and being met in Mexico by seven different friends, all of whom arrived separately and were surprises in their own right. Sarah has truly set the bar for birthday surprises, and I am honestly intimidated by what Justin may be expecting for future festivities of his own.
We ate churros and tostadas, watched Keith consume 50% of the candy inside his birthday piñata over the course of three minutes, and surfed incredibly fun little longboard waves for hours each day. It was a delight to be surfing in warm water again (no wetsuits!!) and an extra delight to be in that water with our friends from home! We spent tons of time with Anna and Louis, besties who used to live in SLC but are now in Oregon, and did some good plotting for future surf trips. Punta Mita, we’re coming (back) for ya!
Back on the mainland after a week of tropical beach adventures, it was back to wetsuit life and back to hanging out with other peoples’ dogs in exchange for free housing. This next sit was noteworthy for one main, depressing reason: profound flatulence. Duncan and Ruby were both purebred Gordon Setters, large, slobbery, black-and-brown dogs with low IQs and, we suspect, very high price tags. Ruby’s main personality trait was a desire to run away; we were informed by the dog parents that if we dropped the leash, she’d bolt north up the beach literally until she dropped from exhaustion (Ruby, what are you running from??) Duncan, her younger brother, was an obsessively people-oriented dog with a drooling problem and the most toxic and powerfully offensive gas I’ve ever experienced in a living thing.
And! These dogs lived in the nicest house we’ve stayed in yet: a multimillion dollar home with a saltwater pool, walking distance to the sea turtle release nursery on the beach, and a 10 minute drive to La Pastora, our favorite wave in the area. We stayed in the master suite, which truly felt like a luxury hotel (except with dog farts.)
A few days into our stay at Dog Fart Mansion, we officially hit our Big Trip one year anniversary! January 10 is the date we left San Francisco for Singapore, and that’s when we count the official start. We celebrated with surprisingly legit tonkotsu ramen in downtown Todos Santos, and spent some time talking about our favorite moments, meals, and people from the past year. Believe it or not, this first email newsletter is now from almost exactly a year ago.
Our Big Trip plans were loose from the start, but we always knew we wanted to make it to the one year mark — and with January 10th in the rear view, we both started to double down on what happens after Big Trip.
We’re lucky that my work with Trimble Advisors has sustained us through Big Trip, but recent math has confirmed that ending Big Trip is actually going to be about 100% more expensive than continuing it would be. Why not just keep going, inquiring minds have asked? Well, we’ve loved this year more than anything, but we’re also starting to get a little jaded! It’s hard to appreciate novelty when you experience so much of it that novelty itself starts to feel normal. Plus, we miss all of you, our friends and family!
So since we’re coming back, we’ve been spending a lot more time sitting around on our computers — Justin applying for jobs, and me doing client prospecting. That, and fleeing whatever room Duncan was currently crop dusting, only to have him follow us to the next one with great enthusiasm. Not glamorous, but Big Trip can’t be all fish tacos and perfect waves! Sometimes it’s dog farts and Zoom interviews.
After we parted ways with Dog Fart Mansion, we had another quick circuit of friend visits before leaving Southern Baja! My Peace Corps bestie Colleen was in San José del Cabo with her partner Mike and her immediate family for a winter adventure, and Colleen graciously made time to meet up with us for the best birria in Baja. We even caught Mike for a post-bike ride paleta! After hanging out with them, we drove back through Todos Santos to a.) pick up my surfboard from the repair guy, after a board collision ended with a fin through my board, and b.) see our SLC friends Brent and Danielle, who were in Baja for their honeymoon part two! And nothing says honeymoon like meeting up with us to go eat quesadillas on the side of the road, which is exactly what we did.
Something we haven’t talked about much during our Baja era is the travel itself. Over the course of the past three months, we’ve driven well over 1,500 miles — most of it through wide open desert. The Southern tip of Baja California Sur is pretty densely populated, and the Northern section of Baja California (not Baja Norte; there is no Baja Norte, just Sur and regular,) near the border also has a lot going on. But between La Paz and Ensenada, it’s small towns, and then it’s... space. Saguaros, joshua trees, agave plants, heaps of boulders that look like they fell from the sky, rogue burros, and lonely shacks selling gasoline and burritos at junctions. Highway 1 is asphalt now, but long stretches of it are pocked with alarmingly deep potholes. To drive Baja, you need an almost supernatural understanding of where your car’s tires are in space and time.
Occasionally, we pass through military checkpoints. The military presence in Baja gets talked up a lot by Americans and Canadians road tripping through; a lot of the fear, I think, is rooted in the fact that hardly any of the tourists speak Spanish. With no ability to communicate, everything just feels spookier — the guys in camo with machine guns are much more ominous when you don’t realize they’re just asking whether or not you get cold when you go surfing. We’ve had extremely mellow interactions with the militares; in addition to, yes, actually chatting about wetsuit technology at the stop outside San Quintin, we did have our car searched once, near San Ignacio. One guy casually poked through the car while asking Justin, repeatedly, if he had ever smoked marijuana in his entire life. After confirming that no, of course not, he absolutely would never, he bid us buenas tardes and we were on our way.
Leaving Todos Santos was a significant milestone in our Baja era: we were officially going north. With four surfboards between the two of us, beers and tortillas in the cooler, and a naive sense of optimism about the Impreza’s off-road capabilities, we set off on our surf tour of the Pacific Coast. Our first stop was Punta Conejo, directly across the peninsula from La Paz.
The surf forecast was dire, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that the wave was working just fine! We were both able to surf, although this is a good moment to remind our friendly readers that surfing is, well, hard. I’ve learned both mountain biking and rock climbing as an adult, and neither one holds a candle to surfing’s learning curve. It’s endlessly humbling, and the diversity of our Big Trip surf destinations has given me lots of opportunities to fail or lots of opportunities to learn, depending on how I decide to look at it on a given day. To be honest, it felt like I was mostly failing at Conejo — but that’s okay! I was still in the water, and I’m always learning something when I’m there.
When we weren’t surfing, we read in the shade of the car (Justin finished “Prophet,” I finished “The Calculating Stars,”) ate quesadillas, and appreciated the wildlife. Above us at all hours were seagulls, pelicans, turkey vultures, osprey, great blue herons, and frigates spiraling above on endless thermals; out to sea, we saw dolphins, distant whales, and one morning, a sea lion that looked me directly in the eye before slipping back under the waves. Walking down the beach, we saw an army of red and aqua-tinted crabs scuttling over the rocks, and the beached head and gills of a small hammerhead shark, seagulls nibbling at the fleshy gill filaments that once helped it breathe.
All beaches in Mexico are public land, but it’s never totally clear where “beach” ends and private land could begin. Even though Conejo feels like the middle of nowhere, we had been told we should expect to pay for camping, despite the lack of services, security, or any indication of human presence. Lo and behold, one morning as I was making coffee, a Mexican guy in ragged board shorts emerged from the dunes and announced he was the campground host. He asked for 200 pesos, had me write my name on an otherwise blank page in a notebook, and then he wandered back into the dunes and I never saw him again. Classic.
After one last night below the impossibly bright Conejo stars, it was time to head back to wifi so Justin could put in a few days of prep for an upcoming job interview. We went out for one last surf (I’ll be honest, I was mostly hoping to commune with another sea lion,) packed up camp, and drove back down the twisty dirt road to the highway, onwards to Loreto.
We’d heard from other travelers that Loreto was a cute town worthy of a stopover; maybe we’re jaded, but it felt pretty unremarkable to us. Still, we enjoyed hot showers and a few days in civilization. We also had some truly incredible carnitas, prepared by a man who was able to perfectly eyeball 3/4 of a kilo of meat — the skill of a true expert.
Justin’s been bemoaning his lack of a “cozy pant” for weeks now (it really does get cold here at night) so we wandered over to a secondhand shop one evening after sunset. All over Baja are segundas, oftentimes just a series of folding tables under an easy-up, selling heaps of second-hand clothes purchased in bulk from the States. As we pawed through heaps of childrens’ sweatshirts, the owner of the segunda came over to chat us up.
José was a middle-aged guy who grew up in Tijuana, and he told us that as a teenager him and his friend decided they wanted to cross the border to see what it was like on the other side. Back then, he said, there was no wall — you could just walk across the arroyo and you’d be in America. So they went, and spent 48 hours wandering around San Diego with no plan, no money, and no English. Pretty quickly, they realized their adventure wasn’t as glamorous as they anticipated. They started walking south down the beach — at some point, José figured, they’d be back in Tijuana, but man did it seem like a long way. When a Border Patrol agent slow-drove past them, they just went up to the guy and were like, excuse me, can you take us back to Tijuana? And believe it or not, he did.
Years later, José’s wife and daughter were living in California, and she invited him to come visit. He applied for a visa, but because of his teenage misadventure, he was declined. Instead of dealing with finding a lawyer and re-applying, he found a way to cross illegally, and joined his wife and daughter for a trip to Disneyland, where a friend got them in for only $12.50. What a deal!
After Disneyland, he crossed back over, and now lives in Loreto, where it’s calmer than in Tijuana. He said that he prefers Loreto to San Diego — “no hay que vivir escondiendose,” you don’t have to live hiding yourself, which is what his wife has had to do in California, since she’s undocumented.
José told us that to apply for a US visa, Mexicans have to pay $150 just for the appointment — and sometimes you get declined, so you paid $150 for nothing. He asked us if we thought Americans should have to pay for visas to get into Mexico, we said yes, que nos cobran! I think Justin and I each paid $60 to get into Mexico — and we’ve been here for three freaking months. It’s the cheapest and longest lasting visa we’ve had anywhere in the world. We talked, too, about how kind people are to us as Americans in Mexico, and the legitimate shame we feel at how Mexicans are treated in our own country, especially now.
We parted ways with José, grateful for the exceptional stories and the hospitality. But no, Justin didn’t find a cozy pant at José’s segunda. He still hasn’t. Please pray for his cold legs.
We’ll be back soon with another newsletter installment — with more beach camping, a death-defying dirt road adventure, and possibly the best tacos in all of Mexico.
We love you guys!
-Dory & Justin