Beach Camping in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Hi, we're Mel and Jay. Together with our cat Benny, we're traveling the Baja Peninsula all the way to Cabo and back. This is the story about our adventures in the town of Loreto where we bushwhack our way to the beach, take a beautiful drive and check out the best preserved mission in all of Baja. That's when you drug your cat. We didn't drug him, we gave him an anti-nausea. There is no right turn. We're parked across the road from where we're supposed to turn in. Doesn't look great so I've got to go investigate. It's a pretty big bump but I'd say it's doable. Now there's a pretty massive bump here too. Looks like people have put some rocks and things to try and make it slightly less massive. From here on in though the road looks pretty decent so I think we give it a try. See that rock. Back up. Oh my lordy. Just move very slow. Go to the right. Well the bumper appears to be scuffed. Only scuffed? Well that's not too bad. It may have bent a bit. Was that? Yeah that cracked. Oh la la. I don't know how you did not see that huge boulder. It was completely blocked by the hood the way I was. All right let's carry on very carefully. Jay's just doing some light gardening so we can get through. I'll stop here and decide how to go. And walk? Yeah I'll walk it out a little bit. Got a fork in the road. I'm gonna check it out before we actually drive it. I mean there's hard packed sand, there's palapas. I'm kind of surprised there's not like five rigs here. I think I can see a rig like way down that way. Well we spoke to a nice guy named Max and he said this spot seems pretty safe. He's camped here before. We've got a little bit of soft sand that we're going to be backing into but uh you know we'll be careful. This is going to be a pretty decent spot. Hopefully we don't get stuck. Oh geez knock on wood. Knock on fake wood. So just about every time when we arrive at a site I take out the drone to get a nice aerial view of where we are. So I did that this time. Pulled it out hooked it up and all of a sudden beep. Red. Restricted zone. I'm like what? Why is it restricted? And then I remembered there was an airplane that just flew over like not five minutes before. Totally slipped my mind. Anyways it's good that the DJI app specifically excludes places where it's dangerous to fly your drone and won't even let you fly it. So I think I'll do the next best thing. I'll climb up on the roof and give you an aerial shot from there. So here's our drone shot of this site. And that's our own little private palapa right there. I mean honestly you can't beat this. And that's literally the airport like right there. You can probably see the control tower. So yeah obviously no droning anywhere near here. Dorato was the first Spanish colonial settlement on the Baja Peninsula. Founded in 1697 by Jesuit missionaries, it was the starting point for the Royal Road or El Camino Real that connected the Spanish missions all the way north to present-day Sonoma, California in the U.S. The historical center is really cute with its tree-covered avenues, center square, and mission. All right so it has been a little bit cool the past couple of days here in Loreto especially compared to down in La Paz where it was almost 30 degrees yesterday. Now we're looking at 20. So I'm going to make us some soup for dinner from our Mexican everyday cookbook. And today's soup is called mushroom potato crema with roasted poblanos or crema de hongas y papas con chile poblano. So this soup has potatoes, garlic, poblano chili, corn, mushrooms, thyme, cilantro, vegetable broth, and it's still in the fridge crema or sour cream or yogurt whatever you want to use. Seems a bit of an odd way to roast a pepper. So good morning. It is time for the camp tour. However, first Jay's gonna take a little morning dip. Are you ready honey? No. I took a dip yesterday and it felt icy but we didn't get a temperature reading so we need to get that today. Yes so the weather has changed quite a lot since we've started heading a little bit more north. It's been cloudy the last couple days but also only 13 degrees celsius this morning. So my guess just being in it is about 15 degrees. And? I'm just having trouble believing it. Why? What's it say? It says like 17. That's very cold. In he goes. Dip. Okay. All right second dip. Watch for rays. Okay that's refreshing enough. No need for a third. Now back to the camp tour. All right so here we are on a beautiful black sand beach in Loreto just near the airport. It has not been very busy plane-wise. Two or three little flights per day. Along the beach there are some palapa structures of varying quality we'll say. We got one of the better ones but the one next to us actually is absolutely perfect. The road here I'll show you is pretty hard packed. It's really nice. You may have noticed coming in was a little rough going with some trees. We had to do some trimming but we've since learned that if we follow the road here towards town that it's actually a much better way to come in. Otherwise when you pull off the road near your palapa area the sand gets loose very quickly so you've got to walk your spot. We backed our trailer in so that if the trailer got into some loose sand that would happen before the truck did and then we'd be able to pull it back out. But we didn't have too many issues parking so that was good. That's it. We've a beautiful view of the islands over here. Lots of kind of scrubby stuff. Beautiful mountain view at the back over there. And it's been really really quiet here. We see the occasional dog walker go by on the weekend. Last night was Saturday. We had some little party goers at 2am come in with their somewhat noisy vehicle and then light off some fireworks which at 2 in the morning when you're sleeping that kind of startles you a little. I'll just say that much. Anyways they only let off about four fireworks. We all jumped out of bed scrambling looking through the windows trying to figure out what the heck was happening. So just be prepared for that. It is fairly close to town. We're only about 15 minutes out of town so that's really nice too for being able to run in check out the town, visit Loreto a little bit and yeah we're really liking this spot. We're going on a little adventure. We have been told by more than one person to go and check out the mission in San Javier which is about one hour inland from Loreto. So we're gonna go and see what that's all about. Yeah and we don't really like to leave the trailer just like on a beach that's not secure with nobody else on it. But you know we've locked it up. We've got our security camera running. We're both a little nervous about it but I really think it's going to be okay. This is just it seems like a very friendly beach where just like families come and people come to like walk their dogs. So you know I think it's going to be all right. We're going to go and have some fun today. We had been told that this is a pretty drive but this is flipping fantastic and absolutely phenomenal. I love that they walk in single file. All right so behind the mission you can follow a little path and that will take you to the very first olive orchards that were planted in all of the Californias. In fact in all of the Americas. So it's kind of cool you can see a 300 year old olive orchard and then you can see a 300 year old olive tree. Now it is 20 pesos a person to get in that's only about a dollar though. And same with the museum to go into the mission 20 pesos a person as well. So something we weren't exactly expecting today was to do a lot of shopping and we just bought sweet wine from locally made as well as some dates and they look big and juicy. They look delicious. And a little bar of locally made caramel which also looks so good. It almost kind of looks like fudge which I'm really looking forward to trying later. Anyways now we're going to get some lunch. And that was the cute little quaint village of San Javier. It's an awesome little day trip actually from Loretto. Highly recommend it. But now we're on the drive home and we get to try that caramel we bought also called jamoncillo. Take a bite. It's very soft. It's soft. It's good. It kind of reminds me of fudge. Oh yeah that's like caramel fudge. It tastes like it was made with that um cajeta. Probably is. Do you think? I don't know. It's really good. Highly recommend it. If you come down to Baja seek out jamoncillo. So we're back and we were a bit nervous about leaving the trailer here. And the trailer is still here. Yeah still got the trailer. Didn't even get a single movement notification on our security cam so that means like nobody even walked in the field of the camera. Honestly Baja has felt very safe and secure to us. We have heard incidents where people have had their rigs broken into but it's actually been on very busy beaches where this has happened. And apparently the thieves have just kind of blended in with the campers and just walked into rigs taken something and walked out. So I think with us being very careful locking everything up and having the security cam too you know we minimize the risk. Obviously you can never get it down to zero percent but um we do what we can. Well we've had an awesome time here in Loretto. This has turned out to be a great spot. And next week we are revisiting an area that we've already been to called Baja Conception. But we're gonna stay on a different beach. We're going to El Recason. We'll see you next week. See you then. Do you want that top one? That one? Yeah. This one? Yeah. That? Yeah. No no no no. On the same tree. Make sure you don't miss the next video by liking, subscribing, and turning on notifications. Oh and don't forget to check out our website and sign up for our weekly email blast. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you in the next one.