The best part of Baja…

For me, you might wonder…what was the best part of the CSC Inaugural Baja Run?   Hands down, it was the people I had the privilege of meeting and with whom I rode.   We had 15 grand adventurers on that ride, and getting to know every single one was a real treat.

Good buddy Pete

One guy I particularly enjoyed meeting was Pete.   Pete flew in from the east coast (he’s originally from New York, which is not too far from where I grew up).

Pete had a great sense of humor and he was one of those people you just like as soon as you meet him.   Now that I’m writing this, though, I realize the same is true for everyone on the Baja ride.

Our turnaround point on the Baja Run was Santa Rosalia, a little Mexican town I love and one in which I’d like to spend more time (and I probably will this summer, as I think I’m going to point the RX3 south and meander down that way again in a few weeks).

We stayed in the Frances Hotel while in Santa Rosalia, as it’s a favorite of mine and it’s just dripping with authenticity, history, and charm.   I mentioned in a previous blog post that one of the things I like about the Frances Hotel is that the rooms have real keys…there’s none of this high-tech plastic key swipe baloney.

Santa Rosalia’s Frances Hotel

All right, time for another good story.   You’ve heard me mention Juddy, one of the guys on the trip who is a real gentleman, and who obviously has a very refined sense of interesting practical jokes.

Good buddy Juddy

Okay, so the night we were in Santa Rosalia, Pete accidentally locked himself out of his room at the Frances Hotel, so he left to get another key from the lobby.   A few of the riders on our Baja expedition were standing in front of Pete’s room while Pete was off fetching another key, when Juddy happened along.   He heard what had occurred, and for reasons I can only guess at, Juddy was able to unlock the door in seconds by using a card to push the door bolt open.   “Don’t tell Pete,” Juddy told everyone, seconds before Pete reappeared with a substitute key.

“What’s going on?” Juddy asked Pete.

“Ah, I locked myself out of my room,” Pete said, “and I got another key from the office.”

“Wait,” Juddy said.  “I have an app on my iPhone that can unlock the door,” and with that, Juddy punched a few buttons on his iPhone screen, he held it next to Pete’s door knob, and then said, “try it now…”

Pete did.   The jury is still out on whether he knew Juddy was having some fun with him.

You’re hearing this story second hand, as I was off doing something (probably writing a blog entry) and several other folks told me about it.    I wished I had been there to see it in person.   Everyone had a good laugh, and I’ve probably told that story 30 times already.    It was that kind of a trip.   Grand fun.

John (of the John and Jay team from Washington state) told me that he thought the best part of the trip was our ride out to see the cave paintings at San Francisco Sierra.  A good portion of that ride was on a fairly gnarly dirt road.   I thought that part of the ride was pretty cool, too.

I told you on the blog a few days ago that I had ordered a couple of books about Baja, and one of them was about the cave paintings.   The cave painting book arrived, and it’s awesome.   So far, I’ve just been looking at some of the photos in it, and I’ll dig into reading it in the next few days.     It’s one of the reasons I’m headed back to Baja this summer…there are lot more cave painting locations in Baja than I had known about, and I want to see and photograph as many of them as I can.  This is real Indiana Jones stuff, folks.   The civilization that created the paintings did so over 10,000 years ago, and then they vanished.  Poof.  Wiped clean off the face of the earth, just like that line in the Indiana Jones movie.

So, back to Pete…he’s the rider on our expedition who captured that great video of the ride out to the cave paintings we put on the blog a couple of entries back, and here’s another for you from Pete.   It shows some of the scenes at the San Francisco Sierra cave paintings as well as some of our ride back to Guerrero Negro.  I didn’t add any music to the soundtrack (whenever I do that, I get a half dozen or so emails complaining that you’d rather hear the engines), but imagine background music from Raiders of the Lost Ark and you’ll pretty much capture the feeling of what this part of the ride was like…

Pete, thanks again for these great videos!