the Baja 1000

I can’t believe that Mom and Dad haven’t posted about the Baja 1000 yet and Jesse specifically asked me not to post yet, because Mom took an amazing photo of the boys with a rider, but I’ve never been one to follow orders.

This past week, the camp has been in quite a state of excitement as the Baja 1000 comes this way this time of year. Appartently, they have the 1000, the 500 and the 250. Today we got to see a part of the 1000. They run completely off road and have 30 hours (so I’ve been told) to do the 1000km course. I remember, sometime in the 80’s reading a story by Tim Cahill about the Baja 1000, well, I’ve spent some time on the basement of Google, and either it never made the WWW or I’m making it up. At any rate, Mom and Dad said they had such a fun time last year that we decided to head on over when they got close. It was a Very Long Day and, as I’d expected to spend only a couple hours (when in fact, we were there from 11:30am to sundown) I had to run out mid-day for food and water. The kids did pretty well considering that they had very limited room and there was only about an hour that was interesting; the rest was boring and waiting for riders to come in. There were motorcyclists, ATV’s, “buggys” and “trucks”. They all sprayed a LOT of sand and when they weren’t spraying sand, the wind was working at the same job. Today was the windiest of all the days so far and shrimpers are settling into our cove. We’ve heard to expect 2 more days of this wind. Some people can complain about anything…

IF we go again next year, we’ll know better to go for only an hour or two. This was really fun for the adults but not so much (the entire day) for the kids. Course, for a couple of adults with a cooler of beer, it probably would have been paradise, and, you might expect that we encountered this particular paradise pretty much everywhere we looked today.  I’m not sure what I’ll do with the surplus of pictures; maybe I’ll put them on Flickr.