El Tecolote camping fail

While we waited for Wednesday and our appointment with the mechanic, we decided to go spend the night at Playa El Tecolote, just about 20 Km north of La Paz.

Hurricane Miriam is supposed to be approaching the tip of Baja. Given how hot we’ve been in the last few days, when we saw the map below we said “cool! maybe we’ll get some rain and wind!”

So this morning we headed to the beach. It was great for a few hours: slightly overcast, a bit of a breeze. We swam a lot. And by “swam” I mean that we laid in the water until our fingers were wrinkled.

Around 4:30 or 5, the wind got more serious. Sand was blowing everywhere, and rain started to sprinkle. We picked up the stuff that could fly away and went inside the van, figuring that we’d make some tea or soup, read some books, and finally have a cool night by the beach. A few minutes later, slam!, the whole van shakes violently left and right. Thinking if was the wind that was now really picking up, I took the top down. Then we noticed that the locals around us were all leaving. We thought–if the rain gets much worse we could get stuck in the wet sand. I wouldn’t worry about this if I had seen other people around, as everybody here in Baja is always quick to come help push when they see someone in need. But the idea of being stuck in the sand–on our own–at 3 AM when we need to move because the storm got too strong didn’t sound too good, so we started picking up to leave.

As we were doing this, one of the locals who were leaving stops by and asks from his truck: “did you feel the quake?”. “Quake? what quake!?” was my answer. It turns out that the violent shaking had not been the wind, but a magnitude 6 quake about 50 Km north of where we were.

So today, at the same time, we felt the effects of a hurricane and an earthquake. Take that, Florida and California.

We’re back in the same hotel room that we left this morning. At least we had a great day at the beach![google-map-v3 width=”0″ height=”0″ zoom=”12″ maptype=”roadmap” mapalign=”center” directionhint=”false” language=”default” poweredby=”false” maptypecontrol=”true” pancontrol=”true” zoomcontrol=”true” scalecontrol=”true” streetviewcontrol=”true” scrollwheelcontrol=”false” draggable=”true” tiltfourtyfive=”false” addmarkermashupbubble=”false” addmarkermashupbubble=”false” addmarkerlist=”24.337468, -110.310905{}umbrella-2.png” bubbleautopan=”true” showbike=”false” showtraffic=”false” showpanoramio=”false”]