PJ & Shelly San Carlos Bound

We created an area for a game pit where we'll play horseshoes, bean bag toss, etc. We figured out a way to roll up our bamboo shades to allow breezes to come through when we want them. We installed drip irrigation to our plants. We created a garden area and have it all prepped so it will be ready to plant in the Fall. We were counted in the recent Mexico census. Shelly has gotten more creative with the driftwood she has found and made this clothes rack.

While we feel totally safe here, we've added some iron work to secure our place when we travel. We've had iron security bars placed on the casita windows and iron security screen doors. And we've added iron security doors to our electric meter and water pump.

We had bamboo curtains made for the corner of the patio to shield us some from wind and provide shade. We had a pergola built for the casita (little deck) roof and now this deck is more usable and has become our 'sea' themed deck. Shelly created this corner creative piece. We also had a palapa built on the big deck. They had to drill rebar into our garage roof concrete beams to support the posts for the framing. We could chose between concrete or wood posts and we went with the wood - natural and beautiful. They watered down the palm fronds so they were more pliable to weave into the structure. The poor workers had to haul all these very heavy materials up our 31 steps. But now we have happy hour shade. Let's have a drink right now! It is happy hour somewhere!

We took our boat across the Sea of Cortez to Baja this week. The crossing one way is about 80 miles and took us about 4 hours. On the way across we ran into some fog and PJ caught a 40 lb. yellow fin tuna. The first night we anchored in Concepcion Bay. The water temp was 85 degrees so we got in some swimming. The next day we traveled up the coast to the new marina at Santa Rosalia. We walked town and had dinner and drinks. Santa Rosalia is a very old fishing village and there were many interesting sights to take in. This is how they were working on another part of the marina, from a floating panga. We then returned home the next day.

We signed up to go on a boat rally from San Carlos north to Kino, about 80 miles by boat. 8 boats signed up and only 3 of us arrived in Kino due to fog, rough seas, seasickness, and poor weather predictions. We stopped at a cove about 1/3 of the way there on the first night and had a pot luck dinner with the other 2 boats. There were these 4" diameter jelly fish swimming in the water. We arrived the second day in Kino to even rougher seas. A panga took us from our boats to land where a celebration was held in our honor for making this trek. We had to climb this ladder to the pier to get on land (and then climb back down in in the dark to return to our boats - yikes!). Local dignitaries were there and we were treated like royalty with chairs set out only for us. They insisted that our photograph was taken with them. We were presented with ironwood sailboat carvings to commemorate our trip and a dance show was put on for us by the locals. This last one was very funny with the dancer