Our rugged, magical, desert, Baja home!

We always think it is a whale tail welcoming us to La Paz, but it is actually 2 doves, signs of peace, appropriate for the capital city named as such.    

Here it is!  The moment we've all been waiting for!  We have reached our property!  And actually made it in.  It used to be a tiny 2 lane road that wound by our driveway.  Now it is a slick 4 lane highway with a cement divider, fast traffic, and metal guardrails that left quite a small opening for the truck + 27' to maneuver in.  Luckily there was even time for me to jump out and open the gate before Max made the turn in.

Luca immediately found a coil of barbed wire he will joyfully incorporate into the trenches he plans to dig all over the property.  

The absolute first thing we did was start building a firepit from the stack of stones leftover from columns on the palapa 20 years ago.  We found 2 mice, a scorpion, a snake, and a bunch of little brown lizards.

It is lovely that there is so much driftwood so that we could have a fire immediately.  

How many scorpions do you think we've piled in that truck?  How about spiders?  Luca is clearly happy so that is all that matters :)

First fire a total, joyful success.  

The next project is clearly buying a water tank and finding out where the heck to fill it, but first we MUST run down to the beach and say hello!

Stop the presses, shut the front door, and oh my god!  Look at the incredible bounty our friend and long time neighbor ran over to us right away!  Her welcome was warmer and sunnier than Baja itself.  I cannot even list it all - fruits, tapanades, veggies, vino, dried goods galore, that gorgeous woven bag, PLUS 5 different herb plants and a super pretty succulent arrangement.  I smile every time I water these little ones.  Which brings me to....

We went into Pescadero and bought a small tank and found a public spigot (shown to us when we started to fill at what we *thought* was the town spigot and got firmly corrected and set on the correct path).  It feels like it fills at about 4 gallons a minute.  Lots of time for sparkling conversation.  

There is all this metal exercise equipment around the plaza and Luca got a little workout (though in all honesty, he may have just been hamming here 😉)

There are murals all over the plaza, honoring political figures and showing local flora + fauna, but I especially enjoyed this alien themed one.

We ran a long hose from the truck at the top of the hill and gravity feed into the trailer for now.  

Luca surprised us by packing a last second picnic + asked us to do sunset on the beach with him.

Fair warning, the blog is going to have a lot of photos of our beach from here on in. 

So, I am not really showing much of the 'house' in this posting, just because there is really too much to cover at once.  But Luca grabbed a pic of me doing a blog post at the one table we managed to bring + is set up in the front bedroom.  Yes, windows and palm fronds are missing and we certainly haven't swept but this is the life :) 

Trying to be present at each beautiful mountain sunrise.

  

And honoring the sun sinking into the ocean at the end of each and every magical day.

I know Toby is really the star of this blog so I leave you with a picture of him contemplating the desert out the window.  He has been so very happy exploring the property and doing his thing.  He searches us out, day or night, to let us know when he needs tons of snuggling and connecting.  But the rest of the time he does whatever he wants and stays pretty content.  

 I will show more of our view and our house and the daily stuff but I hope you are as excited as we are that we are home and hitting the ground running!