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Published: February 3rd 2010
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Blog Entry 2.1.2010
Peninsula Time
Large recreational vehicles (RVs) are here in Baja, but they are really in southern Arizona, I mean REALLY, thousands of them! They are snowbirds, who mostly live in the northwest and Canada, and come to the sunny Sonoran Desert in the winter. The question is, why do some feisty RV snowbirds cross the border into Mexico to spend the cold months in Baja. It's safe to say that all are sun-seekers, however, the summer here is ungodly hot and only a few hardies stay. We have met some really nice people. If you live in Baja California (BC) Mexico you are most likely:
self sufficient
adventurous
warm-blooded
resourceful
creative
rugged
like wide open spaces
do NOT shop at the mall
and enjoy drinking tequila!
Where we are in San Felipe, actually we are in El Dorado Ranch development just north of town, about 50% of the houses have incorporated their big RVs into the more permanent structures of their homes, and they use them as living space. For many, when it is time to drive back north for the summer, they unplug everything and drive their rig away. The architecture intrigued me the
last time we visited here (10 years ago) especially the half-permanent half-mobile places. There are very few building codes, so the result is very creative. El Dorado boasts of being the largest solar home community in the North American Hemisphere.
Our friend Linda lives completely off the grid. Some houses/lots have underground utilities, but many do not. The soil is sand, the roads are sand, and the groundcover is cactus. When we sit up on Linda’s roof deck we have a 360 degree view - tall sharp mountains to the west and the Sea of Cortez to the east, it’s wonderful to have both. Today the clouds are coming in off of the Pacific; without the sun we are cooler. I doubt the temp today will get much above 60. When the sun shines we have been getting close to 70 with a low around 48.
Those who depend on the sun for energy seem to be mechanically inclined. Linda’s husband Nolan was an engineer, and when he retired here he became a master tinkerer! Now that Linda is a poor widder-woman, she’s having to learn how to run the creative living systems that Nolan put together. There
are water pumps, grey water systems, solar panel tracker systems, gasoline generators, propane heaters & stoves, batteries for electricity storage…
We have invited Linda to tour with us for a week so we are adjusting the chariot to accommodate a third person. Before we leave on Thursday morning we are researching where the whales come in to calve, what weather is coming in, and asking how bad the roads are in both directions.Guerrero Negro on the Pacific coast is our first destination to see whales and we will take two days to get there, camping south of Ensenada near Santo Tomas the first night. We have to go north and west on Baja 3 to pick up Baja 1 in Ensenada because the road from San Felipe south turns to rough gravel after about 60 miles.We found out that a storm a couple weeks ago knocked out 6 bridges on Baja 1, but the detours are passable and pretty short. We will write again about our adventure when we return to San Felipe in about a week or so.
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