This week’s dream: Wandering Baja without a plan

Sometimes going nowhere in particular can make for a truly memorable road trip, said Steven Rinella in Outside. Recently my two brothers, a buddy, and I rented a minivan in Tijuana, Mexico, and headed down the Baja Peninsula. We avoided making any plans or even thinking “about where we’d spend the night.” Our goal was simply to enjoy a week “living the perfect Baja lifestyle” as we made our way to Cabo San Lucas at the tip.

“Baja has only one major road,” the 1,000-mile-long Transpeninsular Highway, which zigzags back and forth “as if caught in a custody battle between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez.” We stayed the first night in the dusty village of Cataviña, where cardon cacti—the world’s largest cactus species—grew just outside our window. Some of these mega-cacti weigh 20 tons and tower 40 feet high. Heading south, we soon reached the Central Desert—a parched and desolate landscape where it seemed that hardly anything could survive. “The plant life looked as though it had lived through an explosion in a needle factory; everything had spikes and thorns growing out of it.” Rolling on, we glimpsed the Pacific—like the flash “of a bare breast in a movie, but that was all we needed to see.”

Eventually we found a beach with a tide pool supporting about 300 pelicans. Minutes later, we had our rods out, and I hauled in a 2-pound bass. The only problem was that having found the perfect beach, we had neglected to stock up on beer. Fortunately, a middle-aged surfer invited us to his motor home, which he kept well stocked with surfboards and wine. “We got lucky like that again and again.” In Loreto, we discovered “the peninsula’s best fish taco.” At the Hotel Perla in La Paz, we scored two great rooms with waterfront views. On our last night, I snorkled along the shore of the Sea of Cortez, and then we pitched camp, grilled red snapper, and shucked oysters. The next day, on the flight home, a woman asked about my trip. I replied that “I hadn’t really done anything, but that it had gone really well.”

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Contact: Discoverbajacalifornia.com