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I made a big investment in bikinis for this sabbatical. Between the surfing, paddle boarding, and coastal stops, I knew I’d be wearing a lot of them. So, I tried them on, one after the other, teals, fuchsias, blacks, oranges—all shapes, several sizes. I preened and posed in tiny dressing rooms, envisioning myself wearing them…

The last stretch of desert highway before La Paz was the hardest. Gone were the curves that whipped us around low mountains, the deep oranges set off against hues of greens and beige, the glimpses and then jaw-dropping vistas of the coast.  Before us lay four hours of straight highway across a mostly flat desert….

Today, I’m interrupting the week-by-week roll out of Princess’s adventures (as well as mine and Ana’s) through Baja because I want to talk to you about Spain. Or, more precisely, bread in Spain. Try as I might, I cannot escape it. The smell of fresh baked bread wafts through the streets each morning as I…

Let’s start today’s post with a Spanish lesson. La Paz. City in Baja California Sur, Mexico (among other places). English translation: peace. For 5 days Ana and I had literally been on the road to peace. For two yogis with a growing list of Rules of the Road, the metaphor wasn’t lost on us. You…

It was only a matter of time before we got pulled over. That we made it to day 3 and shortly past Guerrero Negro before it happened, well, impressive. That we hadn’t actually done anything to warrant getting pulled over, unsurprising. But the fact that we didn’t pay anything, neither a ticket nor a bribe,…

My road to Baja California didn’t start in San Diego or even Tijuana. It started 16 years ago in Granada, Spain. There, amid the utter chaos that paraded itself as the orientation for my job as an Auxiliar de Conversación (i.e., a glorified English teaching assistant), I met Vanessa. Vanessa would be working in the…

An odd melancholy swept over me when I pulled into the KOA in Milton, West Virginia around 7 p.m. on August 19th. I was about 6 hours from D.C. and planning on stopping for the night before driving home the next day. I’d spent the last week or so making my way home. After my…

From Chicago to Mountain View, California, save for a brief stop in Bellingham, Washington, I’ve been on my own. That’s 3,000 + miles of solo driving, hiking (except for fortuitous trail crashing and ranger hikes), meals, camp set-up and take down, nights sleeping in the Jeep, and views of the forests, mountains, lakes, trees, coast,…

Before I continue with my periodic updates about the places I’ve seen, I feel the urge to digress a bit and share some recent conclusions I’ve come to about national park rangers with you. Why, you ask? Because it feels critical. You see, since Glacier, I’ve been toying with a theory about national park rangers…

I didn’t have any set routes or travel plans after Trinidad, except to get to San Jose by July 21st. I did, however, have notes jotted down about places I might stop in between. They looked something like this: Avenue of the Giants (more redwood trees) Humboldt Redwoods State Park (more really big redwood trees)…