Feb, 16, 2020 Sun- Last night we took a little dinner right down the street at a Columbian joint. Great food grilled. We had pork chops that were the thinnest we have ever seen but very tasty. We were a little late for church this morning. We had gone by yesterday to check on the times and a old janitor told us 10:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. So we walked over at 10:20 and church had already started. I guess you have to go with the flow. After church we took a little stroll and got an ice cream bar. We met an old man at the store who asked us to go to the park with him and chat so he could practice his Spanish. He bought a beer,which should have been our first clue. He was a drunkard. He had shit all over the back of his legs and up his shirt and shorts which we didn’t see at first. The park was on our way back to the room so no big deal. We sat with him while we ate our ice cream then scrammed. I said it was our good deed for the day. The man went on and on as a drunk does saying we were his amigos and he loved us. The after noon was spent pool side. We had the whole pool to ourselves. I read for a while and laid around on the float. A nice rest was had by both of us. Dinner was back where we ate last night as on Sunday and Monday a lot of places are closed. We had some wonderful grilled chicken.
Feb. 17, 2020 Mon- we took a quick Uber ride back to the Malecon and shopping area. I bought all of the gifts I am going to take home. I had been looking and looking for certain things for a certain price. Mission completed. Sat on the river inside having a cappuccino and a piece of cake watching the river tide crap float by. I am amazed how fast the tidal current runs here. There must have been some kind of diesel leak or something as it smelled to high heaven and there was a huge slick floating by. What a shame. Anyway, the tide must run about three miles per hour or so. Vegetation of all kinds floating back and forth. Back to the room for a swim and some reading and packing cause, “I’m leavin on a jet plane, dont know if I’ll be back again.”
WEW, what a long evening. We headed to the airport just after 6:00. I got a little antsy and with traffic and all it was a good thing we did. Most everything went like clockwork, until I heard my name called over the speaker system. They wanted me to go down stairs to have my bag inspected. I had a little apprehension but knew there was nothing in THAT bag to get me into trouble, but still it is a little un-nerving. All was good, but when I got my bag back in MX. City the luggage crew had broken my top handle off, and didn’t return it. Too much stuffed into a hard side suit case will do that to ya. Plan took off at 9:00 on the dot. Cheap flight, No movie, no music. Guess we were lucky to get a bag of chips and a drink. We finally got into the room and settled about 2:30. Wonderful five star room with a view of a mountain. I’m looking to seeing what we can cram in on Tues. I would at least like to visit the Cathedral.
Feb. 18, 2020 Tues- What a lovely central historic district here in Mexico City. So much rich culture. After walking down the street to get a SIM card for the phone, we caught a cab to The main Square. Here we saw The National Palace where there was some sort of demonstration and people camping out on the sidewalk. We visited the lobby of the Grand Hotel,
The Palacio Correos (post office), The Cathedral, Zocalo, Casa De Los Azulejos. We also walked past the National Museums. One was closed as they were changing up for a new exhibit, and the other Bill wasn’t interested in seeing. I also stopped in to take pics and drool at the pastries at Dulceria de Celaya. I will share a link from a gal who also does travel blogs who has some nice pics of the same things we saw. This was you can see the same pics without me using my space up.https://www.solsalute.com/blog/12-hours-in-mexico-city. We has some wonderful tacos today! YUMMO!
I took over 250 pics today and could never show you them all. My high lights as always were the churches.http://catedralmetropolitanacdmx.org/galeria/ San Filipe http://profesa.oratorio.mx/ My second and third favorites are The Grand Hotel and The Post Office. What beautiful stair cases.
Post Office 
I could go on and on about all of the lovely buildings I saw today. I would quickly run out of space if I posted just a few of them. We got Bill’s phone up and working for this country and ready for the next stop. We had a wonderful half day here and wish we had a little longer. Dinner in the hotel cafe and a nice sit in the Jacuzzi in the roof top glassed in area. Off to La Paz tomorrow.
Feb. 19, 2020 Wed-A quick walk this morning to stretch the legs before flying to La Paz. The flight was a no frills, had to pay for my coke kind of flight. After a little confusion about the rental car place, it was booked under Turo but actually thru Mexu, and didn’t know that ahead of time. Actually Bill has missed the Mexu name at the bottom of the reservation. Any way, we grabbed the shuttle out to the office and drove to the hotel for our one night. We were recommended to eat at Claro Fish Jr. on the malecon. We had red snapper which was a little over cooked and dry. The guacamole was excellent however. https://www.facebook.com/clarosfishjr/ Good hot shower and ready to hit the hay!
Feb. 20, 2020 Thurs-I slept not a minute last night. UGH! I got up and did a load of laundry at the hotel. We stopped at Walmart on our way out of town and picked up some cappuccino to take back home. We drove three hours through the desert with nothing to see but cactus and dry scrub. Literally. I don’t think I have seen anything so boring in all my days. Oh wait, we did see three giant snakes. Bill hit one by accident and it was so thick you could feel it under the tire. And at least six feet long. Yuck! The next three days were brought to us by…Magdalena Bay Whale Watchers tour…https://www.magdalenabaywhales.com/ We made it to the hotel/ lodge office and had ceviche and guac. for lunch. Before being whisked away on a 20 foot panga to the island. Our Capt, Miguel would spend the next three days with us. He started out by taking us past the buoys where the sea lions hang out. The ride to the island was about 40 minutes. Some slow areas as they were very shallow. The first sight of camp was really cool. There are tents scattered about the hillside with the common space/restaurant in the middle, and two whale skeletons guarding from each side. This is going to be fun. After getting settled into our new digs, I took a little nap as I had a headache and was feeling a little woosie. We had a big glass of fresh squeezed limeade and took a walk up the shore a bit to a little graveyard. I spied my first whale spray right out front at 5:55 p.m. This was a juvenile. I can hardly wait for tomorrow. Dinner was wonderful. A nice plate of fish, shrimp and chocolate clams. Ohhhhhh, the chocolate clams are divine! So smooth and rich and chocolaty. Our Capt. had run into a friend who gave him some Choco. clams. He explained to us that in Cabo they run about $50.00 pesos, and he can get them for $10.00. These were given to him and said he would let me try some raw ones tomorrow. Looking forward to it.
sea lions 
common space 
view from our deck 
some of camp 
real bed 
our guardian
Feb. 21, 2020 Fri- I was so busy snooping around camp I didn’t notice the two osprey nests in the top of the whale bones. They had chicks in there. That is pretty neat. Miguel was 45 minutes late this morning. He had spent the night over on the mainland and too much fun with the girlfriend. But he made up the extra hour the next day. About Miguel… he works 7 days a week for three months being the Capt for the company. Then he takes a week off, the goes to work for the sardine company fishing the trollers and in the processing plant. Then another week off and on to scallop fishing. He is a wonderful Capt as we would find out and a hard worker who loves his job. There are loads of whales in the bay, they say more than 50. The camp has eight boats with capts. We petted a whale pretty much right away. It’s hard to know which way to look at the whales spouts where everywhere. I just love hearing the noise they make when blowing the air out of their lungs. After several hours we asked Miguel if we could go fishing sometime and he took us right away. Out to the rocks where the currents come together is very rough but the fish love it there. We didn’t have our rods in the water five minutes when I had a hit. Yup, turned out to be a night Yellow Fin. Next Bill and I had double hitters. Two barracuda at the same time. Next up it would be a pair of Cabvilla which is a cousin to the gouper. We fished an hour and a half altogether and caught five fish. Awesome. Guess what’s for dinner? Miguel made us fresh chocolate clam ceviche for lunch. They were still moving on the shell so I squirted them with some more fresh lime and let them sit a minute before devouring. I must admit, I like the cooked ones much better. They don’t have that chocolate flavor when raw. We had the two Cabvilla fish cooked for lunch. It was more than we could eat so we had Marco, the owner who was on the island for the day, join us. Bill has been feeling “off” since we left Mexico City. Can’t really put a symptom to it, just isn’t feeling normal. Any way, he went to lay down for a while and I took off down the beach with two Capts. who were digging scallops and pulling octopus. I learned a lot from them and later showed Bill and another lady, Bev, what I had learned. The Capts. also found a flounder in a net to add to their spoils. They ended up with a whole bottle of scallops and three octopus. Bill and I both had too much fish for lunch so no dinner for us. I took a 1/’2 shower in our private furnishings and decided to sleep outside. What a wonderful experience sleeping under the stars with no ambient light, listening to the coyotes and watching the lights from the fishing boats. Another once in a life time experience.
first whale 
yellow fin 
Bill’s prize 
fresh chocolate clams 
morning’s catch
Feb. 22, 2020 SAT-This morning we departed right on time 7:04 there was 2-3 foot waves today. We touched a whale our first half hour our there!!! We saw 6 breaches but nothing close enough to take a picture. 😦 We had a whale who was so curious. “She” came right up to the boat and wanted to check Bill out. He was so close leaning over when she came out of the water she “knocked” Bill back. He darn near peed his pants! We were fortunate enough to see two whales mating. Talk about cool. They do this “dance” thing and the male pushes the female up out of the water. Unbelievable. We also had two whales at a time under our boat rubbing themselves on the boat. Too amazing. It is very difficult to put all of this into words. It seems to diminish it all. It really is too amazing to describe. Bill had fried fish for lunch while I dinned on shrimp k-bobs. All to much again to have a dinner. We decided to “donate” my large Yellow Fin to the Capts. They don’t get any chance to fish or eat this and it was more than we wanted. I only needed a taste. The chef did a great job of marinating and cooking the fish over a wood fire. The chef even had marsh mellows for us to roast over the fire coals. Bill and I walked after lunch to the little fishing village just down the beach from the whale camp. The village has 30 families that live there and are 100 percent fishermen.
hello there! 
shows their size 
fish for lunch 
shrimp k-bobs 
Yellow fin cooked
Feb. 23, 2020 Sun- The best day ever!!! We had a very choppy day today. It took only 22 minutes to get out but 45 minutes to ride back to camp. We had 4-6 foot waves, with a chop. We had two whale under the boat for the longest time. A lot of the time we had two whales side by side and very curious. We petted several of them today. It all seems to surreal. After petting these large animals I was more than content just to ride along side of them and be in their presence. These truly are amazing creatures. They slip into the sea with their tails like wet noodles. So graceful. So beautiful. I am unable to post video here on the blog but I do have some. If you want to see it let me know and I can send it via Face book or possibly email. I tried to get some great pictures, but also promised myself THIS TIME is was going to live in the moment. Some other people from our camp have pics of us that they said they would share with us once they got back to internet. If I get them before I close the blog out for this season I will post them for you. The pics below have not been enhanced in any way. This is truly how close they come to the boats.
Miguel 
our boat 
the only way to ride baby
I would like to give our thanks to all the crew of https://www.magdalenabaywhales.com/ The entire staff is accommodating in every way. They truly have your trip on their minds. I couldn’t have asked for a better trip in any way. If you are considering a trip to the Baja please consider Marco and his team.
The Lauers Travel 