Fire at the Palmilla!

I heard earlier from two different sources who wish to remain anonymous that there was a severe fire in the Agua restaurant at the Palmilla hotel early this morning. Agua is located in the "original" Palmilla restaurant site. When the hotel changed hands several years ago, the basic restaurant was remodeled and the name "Agua" was added. I've only eaten there a couple of times but the food was amazing. (I'm more of a $10 pizza guy than a $300 lobster dinner guy but I promise you that I can tell the difference.) I'm pretty sure that even in these trying times, the owners of the Palmilla can afford to rebuild the restaurant but how long it will take is anybody's guess. My sympathies go out to the employees who will be laid off until the repairs are made.

Near Miss

My old boss called a close call a "near miss." Seems to me that a "near hit" is more accurate. So I would say we survived a near hit. The evil Lady Jimena has passed the Los Cabos area and is continuing on the same path towards the middle of the Baja Peninsula. She has lost some intensity too which should cheer up the folks in her path. By the way, the screenshot above was taken from the Weather Underground site. Highly recommended. There is a lot of weather information there.

As for us, we needed the rain. I'm pretty sure all of Baja Sur will end up with a good soaking from this storm. It is always the prettiest in the fall after a storm. The whole countryside transforms into a lush, green paradise like you see in the movies. We rarely get much rain from October through July anywhere but the mountains.

So much for this particular hurricane. I'll get back to the mudane, everyday, boring stuff.

We're still safe.......

So far, so good. Jimena is still tracking N by NW and looks like landfall will be on a sparsely populated area near Constitucion. There's a nice little town named "San Carlos" nearby where we go clam digging. If Lady Jimena continues her present course, the residents of San Carlos will be hit hard. Here in Los Barriles, we will no doubt have a LOT of rain but the wind velocity will be considerably lower than near the eye.

We came to the restaurant this morning. (In case you're not a regular reader, my wife Donna opened a diner-style restaurant 3 years ago in Los Barriles.) We only had 2 employees show this morning but Donna and I and our nuera (quick, to the bablefish Batman)are here prepping food as well as possible. It's amateur hour at the Roadrunner Cafe!!!! Outside it's raining steadily; sometimes more, sometimes less.

Jimena has become news.

Well She's still coming. Her horizontal speed has slowed to 8 mph from 12 and she's still out there huffing and puffing.The first picture to your right is from the NOAA site. The good thing is that the trajectory has been consistent for a couple of days. When hurricane John hit, the predictions were all over the map from the different agencies. He was headed directly for San Jose del Cabo but at the last minute, took a right turn, went out into the Sea of Cortez, then took a left turn and landed almost on top of us in the Buena Vista area. John was reported as a class 3 I believe but the local wind station broke at about 170mph. It was NASTY. Broke 6 glass sliders in our house and a few windows. Thank God there wasn't much rain: mostly wind. Some storms don't have much wind but dump rain at an inch an hour. You have to witness that much rain for 24 hours to believe it.
The second picture is more of a "visible" look at the storm. Looks bad huh? But since I'm not a weather person, IT LOOKS WORSE!!!! AAAAHHH!!!!! Just kidding. I'm not scared. Much.
One more screenshot. This shows the area that will be affected by the storm. We are located on the right edge of the Baja. (click on the photo, then click the "return" arrow) We should only get some rain and not much wind. We'll see, no?
By the way, I always check a site called "eebmike.com". He or she (I actually don't have a clue who this wonderful person is) has combined data from several sources and the site is the place we Bajonians go for the latest scoop.

Hurricane Alert!!

It's that dreaded time of year again. No tourists season. Everything s l o w s d o w n and you wonder if you're ever going to have another customer in your life. It's hot and humid and the A/C is maxed out and your employees are maxed out and you're thinking about your business and you think, "What was I thinking? This isn't any fun!!" A lot of businesses just say "heck with it" and close for the month of August or September.

But then it gets interesting. A hurricane happens!! Hooray!! It forms up South of the Baja Peninsula and starts coming North. Actually nobody says "Hooray" except our friends who have never actually lived through one. But the point is that a hurricane certainly breaks up the monotony.

So right now we have a fairly strong hurricane bearing down on us. Her (I think) name is "Jimena." That is pronounced "He may nah" more or less using English. (Sorry if I sound like some mean teacher talking to bad students but some people just don't know how to pronounce words written in Spanish)

According to the prognosticators, Señorita Jimena will show us her fury sometime Tuesday. So we're busy making sure the generator works, checking for loose stuff outside, moving things away from the windows and fun stuff like that. You don't want things lying around that can blow through a window.

I've had the dubious pleasure of being here for every hurricane since Isis in 1998. I think 1998; my memory really wants to block out the first one. We were house and baby sitting for some friends who had gone to San Francisco for their anniversary. They were only gone one day when the hurricane decided to show and it was on top of us very quickly. So we were in this Fabulous house over-looking the Sea of Cortez with our 2 boys, 6 and 12 and their 4 kids, 5 through 14. The kids made their own plan, covered the whole floor of a large walk-in closet with pillows, took in a tv and vcr, every soft drink in the house and every bit of "portable" food. So while we were bailing water, saving expensive artwork, squeezing out towels and generally panicking about these peoples' nice house, the kids thought we were having a noisy picnic. In the end there was no permanent damage to our friends' beautiful house.

So here we go, a day or 2 of speuclation and watching the internet updates. See you on the other side.

Give 'im FI' DOLLA'!

The local cops in Los Cabos have a reputation for “ticketing” poor unsuspecting tourists. It’s a little unsettling at best to be stopped by the police in a foreign country and very often the timid traveler will shell out the shekels without knowing why. They have even managed to squeeze 5 bucks out of me more than once.

Well they wouldn’t be getting any money from me this fine evening. My tags were current and I wasn't speeding although no municipal cop has ever stopped anyone for speeding. Yep, they were going to have to go pick on some poor tourist. I was totally legit! Ha!

The very second that thought began to age in my mind like a fine wine, I saw red flashing lights in the rearview mirror and the cop horn beeped.
I pulled over and thought smugly, "You don't know who you're dealing with Mister. I live here." I could hear my little voice saying, "Ahh just give ‘im fi’ dolla’ (my inner voice has an accent but it's hard to put on paper) and wish him merry Christmas and save us both some time." I considered it but 5 bucks is 5 bucks!

This cop walked to the car, shined his flashlight in the windows briefly and greeted me. We chatted about the weather for a few moments and finally I politely asked if there was a problem because after all, he had stopped me. He said “Yes, I'm afraid that you have a taillight that isn’t working.”

Taillight?? Carrumba!! I smiled back and told him “No, I didn't know that but don’t worry. I will get it fixed first thing in the morning.” Then I thanked him profusely for bringing it to my attention hoping that might be the end of it.
"Very good" he replied "It is for your own safety señor but there is a problem, this is an "infraction" and requires a ticket."
Ahhhh, there’s the rub. Well, he had me fair and square but I wasn’t ready to cave in just yet. I kind of shrugged my shoulders and said innocently, "But sir, there's not a police car in Baja that has all its lights working. Can you give me a ticket for that?" He gave me a grave look and told me to get out of the car. Uh-oh this was new. No Baja policeman had ever asked me to get out of the car before. My inner voice had very recently sounded like a zen master while giving me advice but was now large and angry and racing around in my mind screaming, “Why you not give ‘im fi’ dolla?? You a stupid!!” Point taken.

The officer stood behind my car and pointed at the offending tail-light. I casually tapped the plastic cover hoping it might come back to life. No luck. Then he told me to stand and face his patrol car. I looked around hoping to see Rodney King holding a video camera. No chance. Then I thought about asking to see his badge but if he would have said, “We don’t need no stinking badges” I would have laughed so hard that I'd probably still be in jail. So I calmly turned toward the patrol car while the little voice continued to insult my intelligence. He walked back to the driver's door of the car. His mustache-adorned face glared at me as he reached in the car. Suddenly the left blinker started flashing. Oh no, not the old Chinese blinker torture! I still didn’t understand what he was up to. Then he nodded towards the front of his car and asked, “It works, no?” I looked back and answered, “It works, yes.” He then proceeded to operate all his blinkers and flashers and high and low beams. I nodded in approval at each one and then I was told to please walk to the rear of his vehicle where I watched as went through his whole repertoire again and even showed me the brake lights for good measure. His license plate light even worked for cryin’ out loud! He got out of his car, walked up to me with a smile on his face and dollar signs in his eyes. “All your lights work” I said. He waited patiently as I pulled out my wallet hoping I had at least 100 pesos. The entertainment value alone was well worth the price of admission. Unfortunately all I could produce was a 50 which he graciously accepted. We wished each other Feliz Navidad and he reminded me to get my taillight fixed. I sat there smiling to myself as he drove away and realized I had just enjoyed being stopped by the police. Go figure.

My little voice reminded me that I could have just given him the “fi’ dolla’ in the beginning. Yeah maybe, but look at all the fun I would have missed.

The Coffee Shop, Part 1

We were sitting around the coffee shop one day taking another morning to solve the world's problems all over again. (This actually was my coffee shop that my now ex-wife and I opened in 1997. I'll tell you about it someday. Great place).

We had been reminiscing about the good old days of Baja before the land was worth anything and the developers came. The good old days were when the phones worked poorly when they worked, the grocery stores had about 5 products and every time a storm blew through, you were stranded with no gas, no water, no lights, nada for days or even weeks. (There was always beer and birria (goat meat) though). If you actually had some gas, you had to drive through flooded arroyos to get anywhere because the few bridges that existed were washed out.

Those were the good old days. Go figure.

We drifted in and out of subjects mainly abusing our friends who hadn’t made it to coffee that morning. Finally someone's indignation flared up over the abundance of poor drivers, another daily subject that we endlessly flog. Someone else complained that nobody ever gets stopped for speeding and how dangerous it was to drive the highway to Cabo from San Jose. When the weekend came, it got worse because not only do you have speeders in the left lane you have drunks in the right lane weaving slowly towards home.

After we had voiced every possible opinion and a couple more, a local Mexican friend had finally heard enough, "I'll tell you what the problem is. You Americans don't know how to drive drunk." (Now there's a sobering thought) "In the U.S. you're scared to get stopped by the police so you act sober and drive 60 mph when actually, you're HAMMERED. Here, before there were drunk tourists on the road, we drove with our flashers on and crept along the shoulder (where a shoulder actually existed) at about 20mph. Everyone knew you were drunk and avoided you. It was a good system"
While I was trying to wrap my brain around that concept, Señor Oso weighed in with his latest issue: "What's the deal with space?" Space? I wondered how we made the quantum leap from drunk driving to space.

"You know, you're driving along with some space in front of you and out of nowhere, somebody jams their car in YOUR space that you’re trying to maintain for your own peace of mind and it turns out he's only going another block and has to jam himself back into the space he came from. Or how about parking space? Nobody builds parking space here for their business. Ya gotta park on one side of town to get groceries on the other side." Ahh, that space. I've wondered that myself actually. Maybe space really is the final frontier.

If you come down, DRIVE CAREFULLY. The fine folks here in Baja Sur have developed their own driving culture that is sometimes completely at odds with the way we Americans as a whole, learned how to drive. Pay attention, don't get in a hurry and you'll be fine. I have plenty more to tell you about driving. Wait 'til you hear what the left blinker means.

To be continued...........