All I Want For Christmas is a New Transmission in Loreto!

Before this....

Was 5 days of this....

Shortly after pulling into the Rice and Beans RV park in San Ignacio and having a dip(bath?) in their delightful pool, we recognized a dude we had filled up gas next to in G. Negro...Scooter Mike! This guy has scootered down the Baja all the way from Virgina(by way of Key West and Alaska!). On a 50cc Honda scooter. Are you kidding me?? There are lots of certified badasses on the baja peninsula and this guy is certainly one of them.

 

We met another on Playa Escondida in conception bay, a guy named Chris who had been camped out on the beach for three weeks that told us stories about kayaking from conception bay to Loreto over 16 days of huge seas and (very)limited water. There were also a few folks there that we had camped with about a week ago.
We parked it for a few nights here and strung up the holiday lights.

The swimming, snorkeling and hiking was sublime.. and on retrospect, I may have angered the Baja overlanding gods while goofing off with Linds...

oops.

We packed up and drove south(the coast between Santa Rosalia and Loreto is out of a magazine) and pulled off for another night at Playa Requeson, a small beach with an island about 300 meters off shore that you can walk out to at low tide.

Which takes us to this morning...There is something so lucky about driving through about 600 miles of pretty inhospitable desert just to break down as we are coasting into one of the coolest places in BCS, Loreto. Not sure what happened, other than I lost power quickly and rolled to a stop. We had a huge puddle of tranny fluid under the car and a trail of it behind us as far as i could see. It hadn't really even set in before a few guys offered to help. One of the set off for a mechanic while the other crawled underneath the van to see if he could see where the leak was coming from. I couldn't get the van jacked up high enough to get a clean look, and after a few minutes the first fellow returned with the jefe from the mechanic shop. They towed us in and determined that it is not a leak in the line(bad news) but from the transmission. It will have to be dropped and opened to properly diagnose and fix. Manuel is heading to Ciudad Insurgentes for parts tomorrow and we should know more soon...but we couldn't have broken down in a better spot!