San Quintín

San Quintín is an unexciting town, but Hotel Jardines Baja provided a nice little oasis at a reasonable price to get cleaned up and reorganized for the following week of camping.  It is very dog friendly, in fact most of the guests’ dogs were walking around without a leash and no one seemed to care. The resident dogs were a gorgeous and friendly pair of Great Danes.

There is an orchard that you can walk through and we were told by other residents that they encourage picking the oranges.  Also a hit – the playground behind the restaurant boasted two trampolines and Nina was in bouncy heaven.  The restaurant has pretty decent Mexican fare, but is a little pricey to balance out the cheap accommodations.  We didn’t tip on dinner the first night, and the staff felt compelled to inform us on the second night that tipping is, in fact, expected for meals in Mexico.  We finally Googled tipping in Mexico and it turns out you should tip for lots of stuff!

TIP:  tip 10%+ for wait staff, tip 5-10 pesos to the Pemex gas station attendant, and always tip the bell people and the hotel room cleaning staff.

In preparing for our upcoming camping trip, we learned that between El Rosario and Villa Jesus Maria is a “gas station gap” of 200 miles where the only gas, IF available, is sold by “angeles” in Cataviña, on the side of the road, for double the going price.  Santa Rosaliíta, the launching point into the Seven Sisters where there is no gas at all, is inconveniently located between El Rosario and Villa Jesus Maria.  So we decided that our 5 gallon jerry can would not suffice since we’d just been burned by the running-out-of-gas incident in Mojave and did not want to risk repeating that in the precise middle of nowhere Mexico.

After searching in vein for a second real jerry can, we bought the only large gas can we could find – a 20L plastic from AutoZone.  It immediately made it to the top of our list of least favorite gear, but strapped near the back of our Tonneau cover it gave us the peace of mind we needed to make the trip into the wilderness.