As they say here on Cape Cod, “if you don’t like the weather, just wait a day or two.” Today a storm system from the South brought thunderstorms, high winds, and record high temperatures. By Tuesday, we could be getting snow, and the high temperatures will revert to more winter-like norms. This roller coaster ride is likely to last until the end of April.
Naturally this has us longing for the rhythmic normalcy of weather in Todos Santos. Sadly, it looks like it won’t be happening for us this winter. With a new dog (see my last blog post), a return to part-time work, and the demands of life in general pressing around for all sides, we’re staying put for now. That doesn’t mean we can’t dream…
This is our dog Poppy. She is a pure-bred Australian Cattle Dog (Red Heeler) who came out of a hoarding situation. As far as we know, she has spent most of her brief 2 years either crated or left to her own devices with little or no training and socialization. We adopted her less than a week after we got back from our all-too-brief February trip to El Pescadero. Needless to say, she’s been quite a project.
Given that she is extremely bonded to my wife and (to put it mildly) very tentative toward me, we haven’t gotten out much since she’s been in our lives. We are still trying to smooth out the rough edges before leaving her alone for more than an hour or two, let alone planning a vacation.
We’ve had her boarded exactly once – at a place that already knew her and featured the trainer who first taught her how to walk on a leash a few months ago. At the moment she’s too strong and stubborn for us to trust her with a dog sitter. All of which is to say that should we visit Baja again we will either have to board her for the duration or figure out how to transport her from Cape Cod.
Alaska Air has an excellent reputation with dogs, but flying from Boston to Cabo (and back) would entail 2 full days of flying each way. Other people we know, particularly those who live on the west coast, have made the trek via RV. I couldn’t see us making the trip in something as small as our Jeep Cherokee, so we’re at somewhat of an impasse. We’ve been dog owners since 2001, and have made a few trips with our dogs over the years – the longest one to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (where my wife is from). We’ve never traveled without our dog for more than a week.
Our ideal is to be able to spend more than a week in Baja – perhaps a month or longer. This will be a logistical challenge with a dog, but we know it isn’t impossible. Stay tuned.
Not too surprisingly, 10 days and 9 nights in Baja simply wasn’t enough to avoid what could be significant snowfall this winter. Here on Cape Cod we’ve been fortunate not to have received more than a “trace” of snowfall so far — barely enough to bother with the shovel — but it seems this week is giving Punxsutawney Phil not one, but two opportunities to say “Hold my beer.”
We’ve been pretty lucky to have avoided “the big one” in our 6 winters on Cape Cod. We can count the number of snowfalls over 6 inches (with none over a foot) on 1 hand. Even so, the mere threat of snow, accompanied by raw, bone-chilling winds, always has us daydreaming about margaritas in Baja.
When I last posted to this blog, we had made the sad decision to cancel our February trip to Baja in order to care for our dog Tito, who had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in September and was given a prognosis of one to three months. After nearly three months of being virtually back to normal, he collapsed before an evening walk in mid-December. Pale gums meant that he was bleeding internally, most likely from a ruptured tumor. A trip to the emergency vet confirmed that the bleeding was coming from his liver, and that surgery was not recommended. We then made the awful decision no dog owner should ever have to make.
Three-plus weeks later, we’re still missing him more than words could express, much like the widowed dove so beautifully photographed by my wife Mary in Todos Santos. Could our “happy place” offer some comfort while we’re still mourning?
We wouldn’t have considered it two weeks ago, but then we began to think “what if we could make the trip after all?” After a few days of research, and the timely intervention of good friends in the right place at the right time, we booked a beach house in El Pescadero for the first 10 days of February.
Will we adopt another dog at some point in the future? That remains to be seen – after all, we never were able to bring Tito to Baja with us. But we can always dream, can’t we?
A little over a month ago we took the plunge – renting a casita in Todos Santos for 9 days in February to coincide with the 2023 Open Studio Tour, back in-person for the first time since 2020. We booked our airfare, rented a car and lined up a dog sitter for our dog Tito.
Then, just a few weeks later, Tito collapsed in our driveway after his evening walk, barely able to make it into the house. Examining his gums, we noted they were extremely pale, which translated to a veterinary emergency.
Fortunately Cape Cod has a pair of 24-hour animal hospitals within 30 minutes away. Hearing Tito’s symptoms, he was admitted right away. It wasn’t long before we received the diagnosis: a previously undetected mass in his spleen had ruptured and he was in danger of bleeding to death. Given the option of euthanasia or surgery, we opted for the latter, very fortunate to have the means to do so. The surgery was successful, but probable cause was an aggressive cancer called hemangiosarcoma, confirmed about a week later when his biopsy came back.
Having adopted Tito as a 5-month old puppy over 10 years ago, we’re naturally gutted, but we’re determined to keep him happy and comfortable for as long as we can. We meet with an oncologist next month to determine if chemo is appropriate for us. It could buy us a few more months, but no more than that.
After losing the dreaded cone of shame shown above, Tito pretty much returned to his normal self, taking full-length walks, eating as usual (read: intermittently and with much fanfare) and barking with gusto at strangers. We’re trying to focus on the present and to spoil him rotten (as usual).
But yes, we cancelled our plans for February. That was a no-brainer: Baja will be there waiting for us. Sadly, Tito’s run does not, therefore we want to make the most of the time we have with him. Needless to say, remember to cherish your 4-legged friends.
It was 2013 when we first started to think seriously about retiring to the Todos Santos area. We spent some time with a wonderful realtor who took us to Rancho Nuevo, El Pescadero and several neighborhoods in and around Las Tunas. I recall seeing some ocean view lots in Pescadero in the $30,000 range.
We didn’t take the plunge. I was in my early fifties, several years away from retirement, and we had most of our money locked up in our house in Massachusetts. Besides, we wouldn’t be able to spend much time in Baja while both of us worked.
In 2017, we came upon a house in Pescadero that we found perfect. Like most properties in Mexico, the terms were strictly cash, and we weren’t able to take out a Home Equity Line of Credit on our home. Again, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to spend much time there while both of us were working, but at least it would have been waiting for us when that wasn’t the case. Sadly, we had to walk away.
Today, I’m in my sixties and a hair’s breadth from retirement. Properties with ocean views are now out of our price range, as are most homes in the Todos Santos area. Have we missed our window of opportunity?
That’s right. Today’s temperatures will hover just above 50 degrees, with morning clouds giving way to some afternoon sunshine. Then tomorrow night and Friday morning, we have more snow to look forward to.
Since 2012, we’ve only missed a winter getaway to Todos Santos twice – once, in 2018 because we had just bought a new house – and of course last year. So after a two year absence, we started planning our escape in August 2021. At that point, it looked like we were seeing the Pandemic in our rear-view mirror and rented a casita, secured a rental car, purchased airline tickets and lined up a dog sitter. Come December, however, the Omicron variant made us wonder if we had been overly optimistic. We kept close tabs on both the virus trends and our friends in Todos Santos. Then, at the end of January, we had our biggest snowfall in the 5 years we’ve been living here.
While it wasn’t the tipping point, it galvanized us to do everything we could to make our trip a success: getting tested a few days before our flight, planning to either cook our own meals or eat at restaurants with outside dining – in other words to do pretty much what we’ve been doing here on Cape Cod for almost two years now.
Once we gave ourselves the green light, however, the very winter weather we were trying to escape conspired against us. After checking flight status obsessively, our 6:00 AM flight from Boston to Dallas was cancelled minutes before boarding should have started. American Airlines automatically booked us on another flight out of Boston on the following day, but the very same storm that shut down the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport was bearing down on Boston the following day. We scrambled to try to get to Phoenix – out of the reach of the storm – by that evening. We unsuccessfully tried to get there earlier by flying stand-by, but that didn’t work out. We considered ourselves lucky to be delayed by one day, with only a 2-hour flight from Phoenix standing between us and the Cabo airport. Unfortunately, staffing issues with American Airline delayed us another 2 1/2 hours, pretty much guaranteeing us a nighttime drive from Cabo to Todos Santos. We arrived after 8 – a day and a half later than expected – exhausted but happy to be there.
“Casa Nova”, just north of Todos Santos, is very spacious for a couple, so we were free to stretch out and enjoy the house, the property, the neighborhood of Las Tunas, and downtown Todos Santos. The property featured mature coconut, jasmine and bougainvillea landscaping.
You’ll have to excuse the obligatory “Margarita-henge” photo.
Our first dinner outside of the casita was at “5 Tacos and a Beer”, barely a mile from where we were staying. Seating was outdoors, staff was courteous, attentive, and masked, and canine entertainment featured very familiar coloring.
Casa Nova had many unique features, but the one that caught my eye the most was the vaulted ceiling in the master bedroom.
Overnight temperatures dipped into the high fifties, but by afternoon, temperatures were in the mid-seventies, warm enough for us to open the door from the living room to the garden.
Given that our 8-day stay was curtailed to 6 1/2, it wasn’t long before we had to head into St. Jude’s Hospital in Todos Santos to take the required COVID test. Fortunately it was negative. Unfortunately, it meant this was our final Baja sunset.
Needless to say, we are already thinking about our next trip. Major takeaways: try to avoid traveling by air if at all possible. Given that we live in the Northeast, this is going to require considerable planning, but at least we’d be able to avoid airline fiascoes, and we wouldn’t have to miss our dog. He seemed pretty happy to see us.
Not to put too fine a point on it, we woke up to this 2 days after our return:
heavy sigh
I was hoping my winter jacket
wouldn’t recognize me
By our reckoning, this is our tenth trip to the Todos Santos / El Pescadero area. It took several visits before it occurred to us that we could see ourselves settling down here for at least part of the year. We’ve been here not only to escape New England winters, but also to dip our toes in the water during a Baja summer. During that trip, we met with a realtor for the first time for a quick primer on options in the various neighborhoods. By January of 2017, we found what we thought to be our dream home in El Pescadero.
Given that all of our funding was tied up in our existing Wayland, Massachusetts home, we could have made it work if we had been able to take out a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) on our house. In a quirk of property laws, however, we couldn’t take out a HELOC on a property that was in a revocable trust, which was the case with our home. Given that the terms for nearly all properties in Mexico was cash upon purchase, we had to back off.
Given 20/20 hindsight, we wouldn’t have been able to spend much time in the house before I retired, and we didn’t have the stomach to rent it out when we weren’t there, so we don’t see it as missed opportunity as much as we do something that didn’t quite work out. A few months later, we bought a house on Cape Cod and sold our house in Wayland, continuing to make trips to Baja each winter.
Having skipped last year due to the pandemic, the changes we’ve seen over the course of two years been eye-opening. Las Playitas, where we are staying, and El Pescadero, where we nearly purchased, are experiencing tremendous growth. With growth comes the needs for infrastructure improvement, and sad to say, that tends to lag behind in Mexico.
Even more sobering is the sight of abandoned construction projects, ruins of cinder block and rebar – an eyesore with unobstructed views. It’s not unusual for life circumstances to turn what had once been a dream home into a liability. Financial downturns can dry up funding sources, and changes in health and family obligations can present unforeseen challenges. For now, while I’m still working and unable to take too much time off, we’ll continue to rent when we can, hoping property prices don’t get out of hand when we’re finally able to make a move.
Dreams of Pescadero 