Birthday in Mexico

A couple of months ago a friend of mine posted some very beguiling pictures of an empty beach in San Filipe, Mexico, along the Gulf of California, where he had driven from Albuquerque. We considered going to San Filipe, but then we thought, why not just go to Puerto Peñasco, on the north edge of the Gulf of California? It was considerably closer. In fact it was ridiculously close; only a 4 hour drive from Tucson!

Puerto Peñasco, also known in the US as Rocky Point, doesn’t rank all that high on most lists of where to go in Mexico. It’s just a small spot of tourist accommodations in middle of absolutely nowhere, where flat, empty desert sands meet the gulf. Rocky Point caters to spring breakers driving down from Phoenix to party.

No historic architecture, no authentic Mexican culture, nothing much to recommend it except – hello, it’s a beach and it’s only 4 hours from where I live! A beach!

So the morning of my birthday, we loaded our van with plenty of fresh water and lots of food, and headed southwest to the beach.

Here we are approaching the border crossing. We timed it to arrive mid-morning to avoid a long wait. There were only a few cars in front of us.

Crossing was insanely easy, they didn’t check any paperwork, and only took a cursory look inside the van. When we opened the van’s side door for them to look in, a gallon jug of water suddenly came crashing down, flying out of the van and landing at the guard’s feet!

It seems like a very bad idea to have things leaping out of vans at guards with guns, but luckily they didn’t even flinch. (A clear example of white privilege – not only can we nonchalantly cross into Mexico anytime we want, we can also abruptly toss large flying objects at guards without being shot.)

The crossing only took a moment, and we were soon on our way.

The sign says, “Bienvenidos A Sonoyta” (Welcome to Sonoyta). The name of the street we live on in Tucson is Sonoita. When we were first buying our house last year, we tried to pronounce Sonoita in the Spanish way, where the “i” would make an “ee” sound, as in “son-o-ee-ta”, with the accent on the “ee”. But we were wrong, it’s pronounced “son-oy-ta”. Well, turns out we were pronouncing it wrong because it’s spelled wrong, lol. Our street should be Sonoyta, not Sonoita. For awhile some years ago I worked as a city planner in southern California, and misspellings of Spanish street names is a pet peeve of mine! Pretend Spanish is also in that same category.

Soon we arrived in Puerto Peñasco. We arrived prior to check-in time at our hotel, so we drove to a public beach. Here we are walking down to the beach from a parking area; some guys wanted $3 to park in a roped-off section of sand. Whatever. We didn’t see any public parking and it was good enough. We were at the beach!

Here’s what it looked like walking down toward the public beach from our patch-in-the-sand parking lot.

Those beach shelters on the right were for rent for a couple of dollars. It was very hot in the sun but we had been sitting, driving all morning so we decided to walk the beach in the heat.

Yay, ocean!

After walking for a short distance we reached some big vacation condos and hotels. They all had shaded lounge chairs in the sand for their guests, and I was getting desperate for some shade. But John made the mistake of politely asking if we could sit there if we weren’t staying at the hotel. The woman looked at him like, “why would he ask such a thing?“, and politely, reluctantly, told him the lounge chairs were for guests only.

Obviously, instead of asking, we could have simply plopped down in a couple of the shaded lounge chairs like any other white tourist couple coming back from a stroll on the beach, particularly because we’re twice the age of most of the rest of the tourists! But John is a rule-follower, and he didn’t want (horrors) to risk being asked to move.

Without an option for shade, I just plopped down in the ocean to eat my lunch.

The ocean didn’t actually cool me off much because the water was crazy hot. John later looked it up on the internet, and said the water in that area is currently 88ºF, which sounds hot, but there in the shallows, I think it was even hotter than that. It felt significantly hotter than my pool water in Tucson, and I’m not sure how that’s possible.

Just when I thought I was going to burn up, it was time to head to our vacation rental. Our rental was in a suburban area outside of town called Las Conchas. It is just a strip of large fancy houses and some smaller vacation rental units along an otherwise empty beach.

Las Conchas is not popular with the young tourists because it’s about 10 minute drive out of town and there are no bars or restaurants within walking distance. But even so, we were still the oldest people there. When vacationing we’re used to seeing a preponderance of boomers a decade older than us, so it was strange to be the old ones! I guess boomers don’t like Rocky Point.

Maybe it’s because if you’re going to fly to Mexico, you might as well fly to somewhere more interesting. This area caters to people driving down from California and Arizona.

Our room was small and very cute. With great storage!

It had a little table by the front door. Here’s John memorizing the passcode used to unlock the front door. I had to keep a picture of the code on my phone; it was a string of numbers that was too long for my little brain to retain.