From where I sit typing this BLOG entry, I can see the Pacific Ocean.  I've been reading the Wilbur Morrison The Adventure Guide to Baja California, and I spent time remembering a trip Gary Gasser and I took in 1964 down the length of Baja California, and I thought how modern science has brought good stuff into our lives, but some of the adventures possible sixty years ago in the area where I now live are lost forever to adventurers.  The boats down in the National City boatyard could go wherever the waterways lead them, but most of them will go only to places that offer services like those found in this boatyard.  In 1964 the main highway down the length of Baja California wasn't built yet.  Gary and I drove down on a paved road to San Felipe on the Eastern coast of Baja where we launched out into a desert landscape over a dirt road that ran through cactus forests that nobody sees these days if they take the main highway down through Baja.  That little faint blue strip of something in the first and third photographs is the beginning of Baja California, Mexico.  I can see it from where I live. Not very far to the east of Tijuana begins a landscape like no other in the world.  There are mountains and there are deserts, and there are some of the most accommodating, wonderful people living in Baja California. The Morrison Book was published almost half a century after Gary and I drove down from California.

The chapter on "The History of Baja" begins with the following paragraph.  "The interior of Baja California is one of the least-traveled place on earth, despite its 450 years of recorded history.  It begins only a hundred miles south of the western border of the United States and Mexico.  Until the trans-peninsular highway from the Mexican-American border to Baja California's tip at Cabo San Lucas was opened in December 1, 1973, it was a largely undiscovered land of cactus-covered deserts. The sole previous highway was a meandering dirt road that only the intrepid dared, and seldom even then without special cars or trucks."