Tranquilo

Spring has finally arrived in the Baja, the days are warming up pleasantly but the nights are still cool. The garden at Casa Boleo is full of Easter lilies which are starting to bloom. We have a whole flower bed full of them opening up. The mango trees all have little tiny mangoes on them no bigger than a pea right now. The birds are everywhere looking for things to feed their babies. Yesterday I saw an industrious couple of sparrows busily peeling bugs off the radiator grill of a parked truck. And suddenly a peculiar kind of a bumblebee has resurfaced that is called a moscaron. They are big and black and in constant motion zooming around at slow speed. I have never seen one land on anything. They are territorial toward one another. People here tell me they have a really mean bite, but only if bothered. They are about half the size of a hummingbird.

Esperando and I drove up to Loreto with Sweet Pickle to spend Easter weekend and celebrate our anniversary. On the drive there we detoured to Santa Inez to see if our favorite beach had been invaded, but all we saw was a couple of families and lots of empty beach. I guess the road is too long and bumpy, and what with no services such as minimarts or little restaurants it doesn’t draw the same crowd. We drove back to the highway and sure enough all the beautiful beaches were as advertised, a tent city of Mexican tourists packed in as tight as sardines for Semana Santa. I must say it looked like everyone was having fun, we have never seen these beaches so crowded even when the gringos took them over earlier in January and February (which has the very worst weather—cold and lots of wind and blowing sand, crazy gringos).

When we got to Loreto we walked through an open house at the Inn at Loreto Bay. It was a 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo with beautiful architectural detail, a small outdoor patio downstairs, and upstairs a nice outdoor kitchen with plenty of rooftop space for entertaining. We meet some nice people on the beach that spend half the year there and the other half in the U.S. It sort of bothers us the idea of living in a gringo enclave, but so far everyone we met connected with that property seems really nice. We were ready to buy in, but can’t afford it right now, we’re still pouring money into the Casa Abeja remodel.

That evening we drove into Loreto and had a nice dinner at El Mediterraneo on the Malecon recommended by Ray in Mulege. It has a great atmosphere and an excellent wine list. We shared the paella, I don’t believe I’ve ever had a paella that I fell in love with, even in Spain. This one was full of great shellfish but still didn’t do the trick for me. What was fun was watching all the cars cruising by from our second story perch. It was a regular bumper-to-bumper promenade of just about everyone: cops, army guys in jeeps, beer drinking teenagers packed in truck beds, grandmothers in Toyotas and dogs on their way somewhere.