Back from Mexico in One Piece
Tags: Road Trips
Hey everyone, I am back from my little road trip to California/Mexico. It was another interesting time I must say. I will break down the trip for you by location:
Tijuana
Tijuana was an eye opener. We parked our car on the US side of the border and then walked across so we didn’t have to worry about getting our car torn apart on the way back.
The place is a little sketch and gives you a feeling of being unsafe. There are shops everywhere trying to lure you in to by stuff and by the end of our little excursion I was ready to snap.
It is pretty sad to see some of the stuff there. There are donkeys every 10 feet with stripes painted on them to make them look like zebras. They did not look like they were enjoying it very much.
On a good note, I had some of the best Margaritas I have ever had there. The place we ate at offered us happy hour early if we came in so we thought we would give it a shot. The food was also pretty good.
Coming back into the US was not too bad since we took a charter bus that drives you to the border for 5 dollars. From there, we just had to hop in line and show our passport to get back in the the US. It was worth seeing and I can now cross it off the list of places I have been.
San Diego
I love San Diego and would love to move there. The city is awesome but the cost of living is pretty high. I looked at a few apartments in the Pacific Beach area that I could afford so that is still an option.
We ate dinner on Coronado island, which is a very nice place. The view of downtown San Diego is amazing from there. I loved swimming at the beach there and looking at the aircraft carriers in the distance. I also managed to see one of the largest ships I have ever seen come by.
Oceanside
We stayed at a hotel in Oceanside since I am debating about moving here. I love the city because it feels like a small surf city and doesn’t have all the traffic that the big cities have. Plus rent is pretty afforable right by the beach.
I got pretty drunk at some Lobster place on the beach and drank a few too many Coronas and Margaritas. The ocean was much warmer than I remember a few months back. The surf was real nice but I did not have time to find a place to rent a board.
The Way Home
The drive back to Phoenix was pretty interesting. Driving through Calexico on the way back was HOT. It was 108 degrees at 7:30 PM which is fricken’ hot. We got all the way past Yuma before going through Border Patrol.
Then of course, the dog started barking at our car so we had the joy of pulling under one of their little tents. They literally searched through our entire car looking for crap that they did not find. They asked me where I was coming from and going too like 3 times.
Finally, they let us go and we were able to make it back to Phoenix around midnight. And it was still over 100 degrees…
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good to have you back in one piece!
Isn’t California fabulous? I love it here… I’ll never live anywhere else.
Glad you made it back from TJ in one piece… Sketch is RIGHT. LOL
Hope i can go to Mexico this year.
You need to go to Spain (canary islands)
Justin,
I don’t know you, but I stumbled onto your blog. I know you probably have a lot of priorities about where you’d like to travel to outside the U.S. next, but you really should consider making the Chilean Patagonia a high priority on your foreign destinations list. It is stunningly beautiful, and largely untouched by the modern world. It is a place where nature seems in some ways to be at war with man (the only road, a single gravel lane known as the “Southern Highway, or “Carretera Austral,” is frequently wiped off the map by landslides, and flooding, etc., and trucks are often required to ford through rivers because of the loss of many of the local bridges each winter.)
Charles Darwin said the Chilean Patagonia is a place of “sad solitudes, where death more than life seems to rule supreme.” Of course the massive glaciers and ice sheets may have given him that impression, but I moved to Chile when I was 20 and have lived all over the Chilean Patagonia for a few years and I can tell you that life flourishes when you get down below the icy mountain tops of the Andes. In fact, the “selva” or jungles of the area are rife with exotic and beautiful living things. From flamingos, to cougars, to emu’s, to penguins, to tiny little deer the size of a rabbit, the Patagonia is full of surprises.
Go and enjoy the majesty of the Andes, experience the rejuvenation of the many hot springs, kayak among dolphins and killer whales in the grandeur of the thousand fjords, ski or snowboard the dangerous misty volcanoes, raft or fish the troubled waters of the many rivers, and of course delight in the splendor of the local peoples. And then write about it when you come home – or even if you decide to stay.
Is the Patagonia at all sketchy? Anything but. The people are as warm and sincere as any people I have ever known. I have lived, worked, or visited some 36 different countries, and no place pulls on me to return like the Patagonia.