We have been on this beach for about 11 days now and I found out through some Canadian folks, that come down to the condos for 4 months out of the year, that this beach area is called El Mogote (pronounced El Ma-go-tay). We have yet to see any Whale Sharks in or out of the water, although the boats come in every single day and stop in front of the van.
I think they may be seeing other things in the water like Manta Rays, Dolphins or Sea Turtles for I can't see a 40 foot Whale Shark coming this close in with two sand bars, for I'm sure they wouldn't be able to make it out...but what do I know!
We have, however, seen a ton of Dolphins. I see at least 3-4 different pods a day with anywhere from 5-12 Dolphins in each pod, it's quite awesome to see.
I have seen and swam amongst Dolphins throughout my life and every single time I see them it's almost as if it's my first time ever seeing them, they are so magical and quirky. I especially love watching them fish! I have also been able to get some pretty good shots of them so that always makes me happy!!! I have some great video but they are much harder to upload with our data limitations so I have frozen a few images from those videos to show you what I've been seeing for the past few days!
There isn't much going on here at this beach, it's very secluded, I'm sure due to the road getting in and off of the sand. It's definitely not made for every vehicle and with the condos being a few miles down the beach everyone that stays there takes a water taxi into town. We have had the beach to ourselves for the most part, other than a few early morning walkers and the tour boats, it's just us. We like it to a point, for we have a lot of privacy but at the same time we would like more of a Santispac experience where we were meeting locals and other travelers daily. Maybe along the way we can find a nice balance but for now, it's pretty nice having the privacy.
Our usual daily visitors
When Jamie goes into town to upload videos, run errands or get groceries, I stay back with the van and the girls. This is time I use to center, read, write, do whatever I want or need to do without interruption...these days I've been trying to learn some hoop tricks, reading and spending some time with the dogs! Savannah could definitely care less but my Chili Moon loves every single second of it.
There is one more night before we have a full moon, although the moon the past couple of nights has been anything but dull! It has been cloudy though, so I only get to see small glimpses of the beauty that shines above.
I'll take it. I'll take anything I can get while here in Mexico. Who knows when we'll be back or when things will change. This experience has been nothing but great so far and I'm sure it will just keep getting more exciting with more memories.
PEACE
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The day after the trailer fiasco, we woke up to a beautiful spot on a creek. We were parked under these beautiful tall trees that were providing some much needed shade, for the temps were already in the low 90's at 9 a.m. Today our plan would be to scout for a "better" camp spot.
The place we were was a great place but we weren't getting any cell or internet signal, it's a tad bit too shady to get any sun on the panels and there were sooo many fire ants the ground looked like it was moving. I had already been stung 3 times in the matter of 15 minutes and I had to move the dogs and the cooker 4 different times.
We figured since we had so much to fix right now that we would find a place close to town and sit tight there while we fixed everything, then go into Zion after that. Before we left Bryce Canyon, we found two other camp spots, other than the creek spot, on www.Freecampsites.net so we thought we would go check those places out and go from there. As I cooked brekkie, Jamie was trying to get some pages to load on the computer, one of which was our bank information, but since we weren't getting a signal he couldn't access the page. We thought we definitely had enough to cover a couple of $5 purchases here and there, so we wrapped it up and went into town to grab some more hardware, etc. We got everything we thought we needed and drove to the camp spot at Leeds Canyon, about 20 miles from the creek. Leeds Canyon is a BLM area that allows you to camp for 16 days, it's very hilly & mountainous with not a lot of shade.
Even though we were in the mountains, at times on top of the mountains, the temperatures did not drop. I think we only went up in elevation, not even 1,000 feet, there was a lot of wind but just as hot...temperatures still reaching 105+. We drove around for about 15 minutes not really getting what we came up for (cooler temps), so we turned around and decided to stop real quick to let the dogs out.
While we were parked Jamie thought he would look at the internet signal and try to load our bank information again. It was at this point we WERE able to load pages, only to find out we were in the red...-$10.96. Dang it! We called the bank and talked to a customer service rep to figure out how to fix this and all in all the gal was not very helpful; telling us we would have to put some money in the account by close of business that day or we would be facing some major charges. This bank charges $37 per item that is overdrawn, at this time we had 10 transactions that were pending; $5.34 here, $2.87 there. Pretty much if we couldn't cover the $10.96 by the end of business hours, we would be facing about $370 bucks in overdraft fees....totally crazy huh!? Luckily we have very good friends that still live in Denver and my girlfriend was able to go into a facility and deposit some dinero into the account...phew. That whole mess took about 3 1/2 hours to solve and was very stressful. Thank God for good friends! We'll never make that mistake again...always check before buying. Now that that was handled, we still had to find a camp. We drove to the spot in Rockville, fairly close to Zion and to the town of Springdale, that has pretty much everything you want or need. This area of camping is a little different due to the rules; you have to camp at least 1/2 mile off of the byway and the main road or you will concur a $150 ticket, which people on www.freecampsites.net have commented that they stayed there, not a 1/2 mile off the road and got tickets for not adhering to the rules. The thing is, we didn't see any spots that weren't right on the road and we didn't see any other roads or trails for a vehicle to make it that far off the road, so I think it might be mostly for tent campers or backpackers. We drove down the rough bumpy, rugged road a couple of miles then saw the road ahead, it was pretty steep and narrow with no turn around spots in case of an emergency so we decided to turn around while we had the chance...maybe there were some good spots up there, but we weren't about to get stuck to find out. I'm not sure why I didn't take any pics of this road, probably because I had had enough that day and the pictures online don't show the road I'm talking about...sorry.
Back to the creek we went...going in circles one day at a time! On our way to the creek spot we saw some public dumpsters, so we stopped to finally get rid of the trash we kept forgetting to dump. When I was throwing the trash away, I saw a metal bed frame sitting outside of one of the dumpsters, after looking at it we decided to grab it and use it for the trailer. If it didn't work we would bring it back and if it does work, we're not out any more money! I also found 2 brand new bicycle tires that had never been used so we grabbed those as well...it was almost like something told us to stop there to save time and money...recycling at it's best! Waste not, want not. We arrived back at the creek around 6:30 p.m.. There were some people parked at the spot we had this morning, which was fine because we didn't want to park there again anyway, due to the ants and too much shade. Fortunately we can drive further back than most people because we have our AWD Joon! We drove back a little ways where we have a sandy beach area that leads right down to the creek.
We have a couple of trees around us but not tall enough to cast early morning or late afternoon shadows on the solar panels and they also act as a small "privacy curtain" from other campers. It's a nice little place but it's still pretty darn hot.
We were so over another day of stress, stress, heat, stress that we just unpacked and hung out. Jamie gorilla taped my heavy duty bin that broke and pretty much piddled the rest of the day, as well as getting the van in sit mode. We left the awning for the next day...we weren't thinking about the early morning hot temperatures!
We woke up the next day and the heat was already cooking us inside the van, it was about 90* at 8 a.m. The first thing we...well, Jamie did was start putting up the awning. I was trying to make brekkie but the heat was getting to me pretty bad, I was throwing up and shaking...I was dehydrated, I couldn't stand up for more than a minute at a time. I ate two peaches and was trying to drink water, but the heat was so intense, nothing would stay down. I know it's gross but I'm writing it to warn you about the heat and dehydration, if you're not careful it can sneak up on ya and getcha! I was finally able to stand up long enough to get brekkie made and get some food in my belly, pretty much the rest of my day was spent in the creek.
The temperatures are okay for sleeping, if you don't put on any blankets or sheets and have all of the windows open with a fan on. The days are reaching anywhere between 102-114*.
Our awning helps a lot as well as having the creek 10 feet from the van. Even though the girls are not "water dogs", they will come stand in the creek to get cooler, we even saw Savannah walk into the water (on her own) and start swimming around to get cooler the other day, that was an amazing moment! We are making sure to keep full water bottles in the fridge and drink as much as we can during the day. I'm not sure when we'll do Zion with everything we have going on, as well as the hot temperatures. We've even been tossing the idea around of going to Flagstaff for a month or two then coming back, but we both know if we do that, we won't come back this year. So for now, we are going to stay here at the creek, get all of this stuff fixed and go from there.
Sitting in a reclining chair, overlooking an amazing view while typing this, no internet connection so will have to be posted at a later date. We drove out to Canyonlands N.P. a little over a week ago.
We thought we were much further away from the park than we actually were. Canyonlands is divided into 3 districts; The Needles~South, The Maze~West and Island in the Sky~North, but there are only 2 entrances; The Needles and Island in the Sky. When I put Canyonlands into the GPS, four different locations came up, I wasn't sure which one to pick, so I picked the closest one from Moab; 32 miles away which turned out to be Island in the Sky. We were planning on doing much more driving so this was an unexpected surprise. We drove into the park, taking a map at the entrance gate but also stopping in at the Visitor's Center to ask some questions about camping and to buy a sticker for our board. The Visitor's Center has become one of my main favorite stops...the Rangers are super helpful in giving you great information about the park and the surrounding areas. I talked to a ranger for about 20 minutes about camping in the park, primitive camping, points not to miss, etc. The things I learned about this park that stood out to me were; this park is HUGE at 336,000 acres, the road through the park does not go all the way through to the South entrance (The Needles) due to a canyon running through the middle of it, for backcountry/primitive camping they book up about 4 months in advance and requires a permit, and it can take days on most of these 4wd roads to complete 100 miles. After leaving the Visitor's Center, we talked about camping in the campground for a couple of nights, it was only $10 a night and would save us the gas money, coming and going every day, back to wherever we could find BLM camping. We decided to drive through the campground and see if there were any open spots. We were surprised at how small the campground was, due to how big the park is and since it was a Saturday, it was already full...BLM here we come! We stopped back by the Visitor's Center to ask them about BLM camping around the area and I actually got some really good answers. The map that we got from the BLM office was the same map the Ranger gave me, but also accompanied it with a Utah map! Now, we were getting somewhere! He pointed out some places that we just camped at a few nights ago, then some places closer like Gemini Bridges Rd. and Mineral Bottom Rd (About 6-8 miles away from entrance of the park). *Sidenote: We took Gemini Bridges Rd. yesterday on the dirt bike and it is a really rough road with only 6 campsites, it is free but good luck getting up or down that road. It would be a fun 4x4 drive in a Jeep or ATV but I would never bring my Joon van down that road, especially with the trailer on it.* The Ranger had told me where to find Mineral Bottom Rd., which he said was the 1st left out of the park....no it's not. We turned down 2 different roads, that said No Camping, then turned down another road that had a sign that said NO CAMPING in big letters, then in really small print beneath it said, for the next 1/2 mile... gotta read that fine print! We drove down it, calculating how far we were going and found a couple of okay spots but then Jamie wanted to keep on looking further down. I was a bit hesitant due to the looks of the road but I trust him and his handling of the van so, I give in every time. We ended up down this road that turned into mostly rock with some trees and cactus, it was an amazing spot, so we drove down the scary road and are parked here now.
Our view
We have views of the Canyon that is separating us from the park and we're only 4-5 miles from the entrance, not too shabby!
We've been here about a week now and went into the park last night for the first time since arriving here.
It was an interesting drive on the dirt bike due to a few things. First off, it rained here for a good 3 days, due to all of the storms around the U.S., but this wasn't your average rain...we had a frickin' deluge, which we saw last night pretty much washed out the scary road we came in on, now making it really scary!
Doesn't look too bad in the picture!
Jamie is out on the dirt bike right now, as I write this, to see if the sand/mud has packed down hard enough for us to be able to get out. The road that was at a slight angle when we came in, is at an extreme angle now and we just don't want to get stuck sliding down into the muddy ravine. So, he's checking it out and if we have to stay for a few more days, then we will for safety, but the weather is calling for rain for the next 3 days, so we'll have to see! The other interesting thing about that ride last night was, even with what we thought was a couple of hours of sunlight, we pretty much rode into the park, drove about 15 miles and had to turn around due to the sun dropping super quick all of a sudden and it getting pretty darn chilly. We got back to the van and it was dark...so weird! So tonight we plan to go in much earlier than 7 p.m.!
Making up shit on how Canyons are formed
From what I gather, this part of the park doesn't have many big mile hikes but there are a lot of observation and viewing points.
We decided we would go back into the park the following day, we geared up around 5 p.m., got on the bike and headed toward the entrance, all the while seeing gigantic rain clouds and black skies forming. Before we even got to the main road, we both decided it would be best to turn around right now, pack up the van and get out of our spot before another storm hit. I had heard on the radio (since we have no wifi) that it was supposed to rain for 3-4 days, meaning that would keep us at that spot for at least another week, so the road could dry out enough for us to drive on and get out. Since we were ready to leave, we went back to the van and packed everything in record time...45 minutes!
We were a little worried about a few spots in the road, due to the last rain washing out half the road....but we were determined to not hurt the van and at least get on more solid ground for the night.
We did it, while I filmed, Jamie drove. We made it past all of the tough and scary spots and stopped to sleep for the night on the same road but much more solid if it did rain that night....which it did (as well as the next 5 days)!
If you want to see the video of us getting out of that road, click the link here:
The next day we went into the park for the last time and while the storm was building around us while we were there, we only got a few hard sprinkles.
Island in the Sky ~ Potash Road
Grand View Point Overlook
The Orange Cliffs
I'm
sure this park has much more to offer than what we saw, but I guess
we'll just have to come back to see what we missed at a later date.
PEACE
If you are interested in seeing what Potash Road is like,Jamie did the ride on his dirt bike and you can see that video here:
