After crossing the border on New Year’s day we had the entire Baja peninsula in front of us. We were headed southbound for at least the next week. Our first night was a relatively quiet one, after a couple hours of rough road we found ourselves on the beach near La Calavera. We had thought there would be more there, but an old sign was all that was there to note that we had arrived. We found a spot overlooking the beach and watched the sunset.
We ventured south of the border to Baja Mexico for our first time, in January 2022. As with any trip, a big portion of it is the planning and anticipation, but for this trip, being it involved leaving the country and venturing to a place we hadn’t been, then throw in the fact that there’s another language involved, well, there was a bit of work too do to prep for this trip. This post will cover a bit of trip prep for Baja as well as our experience crossing the border, then we’ll get to the actual trip in following posts. Hopefully this post will be useful to those who are considering or planning a trip in the future.
A while back now, while perusing some guidebook or other I ran across a list of scenic drives to take in Oregon. A lot of them were your standard (yes, scenic, but still standard) state highways. But one in particular caught my eye as it linked together some very developed but a bit more out of the normal flow of traffic roads to create a route up the western side of the Cascades in Oregon from Oakridge to Estacada. Portions of it have been closed by landslides and wildfires ever since. Until July 1 that is. It just so happened we didn’t have any other plans for the following weekend, and off we went.
We didn’t quite make it to the byway on Friday night, but we did make it just to the west side of the Cascades, and spent the night at Gold Lake. The mosquitoes were still alive and well, but not as bad as our trip to Miller Lake a couple weeks back.
