This and that from San Felipe…

With plenty of time on my hands, it was fun just wandering around visiting shops along the malecon and then sitting with a popsicle watching the ocean and enjoying the sites. And only a couple days after that big storm I mentioned in last post. When I heard the day it happened that the refurbished and remodeled baseball park was ready to open, I hightailed it down there for the festivities…

All the local teams are here, and a couple visiting teams too. Men’s and women’s teams, boy’s and girl’s teams. Softball and hardball. There is a league for everyone here.

I was here for a game or two last year and the stadium and park needed rust removal, new paint, groundskeeping, and new safety screens. The remodel did all that plus put in all new fake grass over the entire field.The politicians and donors and baseball officials all spoke. Gah! If I’d known they’d take an hour and a half for all that, I would have gotten here an hour late at least. Boring stuff.

Finally though, it’s ‘Play Ball’. First pitch thrown out by an official and the game is underway. This game is the adult softball league with local and out-of-town teams. There were other games scheduled later in the day. The fence in the background can be moved back for hardball. After a couple runs scored, I noticed there’s no scoreboard! Anywhere! No obvious place where it might go, either. See all those light posts with the big floods on them? With that much investment, I’d have thought they would also put in a scoreboard back there too. Or maybe near the grandstands. But nope. There isn’t one. Not even a small, temporary, board. And since all the announcements are in Spanish, after a while I had no idea what inning we were in, or what the score was. Also, the team that hung out in the ‘Visitors’ dugout got more cheers from more of the crowd than the team that was in the ‘Home’ dugout? What the hell? The uniforms were not obvious where each team was from either. At least to me. Then I moved down a ways on the bench seats because it was getting a little chilly in the shade just as someone got a long hit with the bases loaded. I moved over to this side into the sun to try to warm up. I’d been in the shade over on the other side of the stadium for over an hour and the breeze gave me a chill.

I never did get a handle on the score or why the ‘Visitors’ were more popular than ‘Home’ but it was fun anyway. The park looks much better now and I look forward to watching more games here. Stadium looks great now.

A few days later, one of my Fairbanks, Alaska friends, Stacy, contacted me. She and I have hung out in Mexico in Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta a lot. She has a sister who contacted her about a great land deal she was interested in in San Felipe and thought Stacy might know someone there. Turned out, she did…me! Total coincidence I was in San Felipe since I go a different place in Mexico every trip down here. Anyway, Stacy contacts me, finds out I am in San Felipe, and asks if I could take pictures of the plot her sister wanted. And in another coincidence, turned out, I’d recently gained a new friend who found me on a RV’ing forum and she knew I help people with their RV problems. She had recently bought a Winnie Journey almost exactly like mine, only her’s is a ’04 while mine is a ’02. And she’s a RV newbee so she was looking for advice. Anyway, she’d contacted me via email, and we discovered we were both in San Felipe. And she’s out at the El Dorado…where that piece of land is. She owns her own plot out there with a palapa, a ramada, and covered cement pad parking for her RV. Sweet. We had been hanging out and comparing notes on our RVs and she was more than happy to give me a tour of that gated community where the improved plot of land was. It’s a bitch to get into that gated community if you don’t live there. You have to deal with the sales office. So it was very handy that she could let me onto El Dorado’s property and drive me around what is essentially her stomping ground.

Stacy send me PDFs of the property plats so we could find it. A bit of driving around (it’s a huge development, but sparsely populated right now) until we found the plot. And here’s a few pictures I took there for Stacy’s sister…

That white stake is in the middle of the property, that’s the ocean off in the distance to the west. Sea of Cortez.

Here’s a shot looking south. And that’s the main road to the property. You can make out a couple houses and they get more frequent the further south you go. This particular section isn’t built up much yet.  Looking west. And finally, looking north.

El Dorado ranch is HUGE. It goes almost 10 miles west from highway Mx-5 and it’s several miles north/south from here too. And there’s huge chunks of land owned by the same company on the east side of the highway. The property we were looking at is in block 20.

(Press and hold CTRL while rotating the wheel on your mouse for an expanded view of the map).

A few days later, my friend Dawn and I went downtown for some kind of festival. They have it here every year, it’s a mini mardi gras, with emphasis on mini.

I came over early to get some pre-event pictures.

This guy has all these really colorful sweets, fruits, candies, hot spicy stuff usually. Oh, and nuts too, but they all have lime sprayed on them.

Well, my internet connection is acting up so I’ll have to continue this next time with more pictures of the Carnival.

Thanks for reading!