Sunday, December 30, 2012

Happy Holidays

A few days before Christmas we drove down to Costco in Cabo via Todos Santos, a lovely town on the Pacific side of Baja California.  We ate lunch at Hotel California in Todos Santos before our big shopping expedition at Costco.  Having looked at the map which shows a possible round trip by heading down the Pacific side and returning to La Paz on Hwy 1 on the Sea of Cortez side, we set off on Hwy 1 at 3:30, hoping to arrive in La Paz by 5:30.  The road is a mountain road (not clearly identified as such on the map) with slow trucks, motor bikers, and sharp curves.  We arrived at "home" ar 7:30!  The scenery was beautiful, however!

Christmas came and went.  We had a nice breakfast aboard Damiana with Sue and Alex of Maitairoa and Lynda and Bob of Tahoma.  We served Roy's Kringle with, OJ, scrambled eggs, fruit and coffee.  We also had fresh fruit from Maitairoa, included fresh strawberries!  A little later in the day, about 17 people from 9 boats showed up for a potluck that we organized here at our marina which is quite distant from town.  We served the turkey mentioned in an earlier posting along with cranberry sauce, potatoes and carrots.  Roy made turkey broth, currently frozen in cup portions in our freezer.

Since Christmas we've shopped even more in town, including gifts for Cambria's birthday on January 20.  After driving around for 30 minutes we finally located UPS.  They couldn't take the package until we had it cleared through Mexico customs.  So we went to customs and realized that we needed to have a shipping box (we thought UPS would have sold us one) so we went to a shipping box store, bought the box and went back to customs around 4 pm -- closed! Back to customs the next morning, then to UPS and finally got it shipped off.

Yesterday we went to the marina office to pay our last bill (planning to leave early Monday morning), made arrangements to park our car near their office and Lupita suggested that we have a cover for it.  So, off on another adventure trying to locate Auto Zone.  Roy had a recollection of seeing one in recent history, and thought it was on the way out of town on Hwy 1.  After driving for a few miles past the commercial area we realized it wasn't there -- so on the way back into town we stopped and asked someone.  He shook his head, knowing what we wanted but couldn't tell us in Spanish that we understood -- we just headed back into town.  Lo and behold, Auto Zone is right next door to UPS!  No wonder it's image was stuck in Roy's head!

We're so glad to have our car here so we can have all these fun adventures.  Tomorrow we leave, heading north toward Loreto where we'll pick up Len and Norma on January 16.  It's raining today, we expect mild (10-15 kt) north winds for the next several days, but we'll take it slow and easy.....

~~~ Marlene & Roy ~~_/) ~~

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