Dog Day Afternoons

We’re officially on the new-to-me part of our trip, nine days in, because we’re now past Loreto, the farthest south in Baja I’d been before (last year with Juan). We’d wanted to hang out for a few days at the beaches to decompress from the long process of leaving San Francisco, but it was just too hot to be very enjoyable. As long as we had to break camp to go out for ice, it seemed like we might as well move on. At least in the moving van, you get a breeze.

We opted to stay in a hotel in Loreto.

This made Milo very happy.

This is my favorite part of each day.

The next day we picked up and left for Adolfo Lopes Mateo, back on the Pacific Coast, in search of that elusive breeze. We ended up parking next to the beach in the area they use for boat launches in the whale-watching season. It’s sort of a run-down little town. A girl there broke her leg when the rotting wood on the pier gave way. And then we spent most of the afternoon rescuing a dog that some naughty kid must have tossed into a boarded-up office. The dog was trapped far below a counter and behind some locked bars.

First, Juan tried to coax it into a bag with food, but the dog would just stick her head in, grab the food and then fumble out while he tried to lift her.

Next, we tried my idea: feed a board in the narrow space under the bars that the dog could use as a ramp to walk up, and then pull her through the bars. I stole this sign off one of the stalls just as the groundskeeper was coming in to close the parking lot. But with him there, it was okay.

They secured a rope around the board so they could lift it and pull it out.

Success.

Milo greeted the new friend, whose cries he had heard all afternoon.

We spent a nice evening with the dogs. The lot was pretty breezy and we enjoyed some great carne asada tostadas in the van, but it turns out that what felt like every vehicle in town visited the parking lot that night.

We had a bit of car trouble on the way out of Puerto Adolfo Lopes Mateo. I drove my first leg (about 6 km out of what, 1200 so far?) so Juan could run beside us and try and see what was wrong.

They improvised a fix in the next town, Ciudad Insurgentes.

I think I have finally adjusted well enough to the heat to not even try and think until sunset.
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