San Quintín--Beach Weekend

Last weekend I went down to join the family for a few days. They had Monday and Tuesday off for Mexican Independence Day, so we all had a long weekend. After some hemming and hawing, we reserved a room at a beach side hotel in the town of San Quintín, which is about 120 miles south of Ensenada on the Pacific coast.

I'll share the pictures here, mostly, with a bit of commentary thrown in for good measure. It was a very relaxing weekend--not a lot to do in San Quintín, as it turns out, but that was fine. Everyone needed a bit of down time.

La Playa Santa Maria de San Quintín at sunset.

The beach of Santa Maria is gorgeous...wide, gently sloping, natural beach that seems to go on forever...the ends of it fade off into the haze. The sand is a marbled black and white, and the wind and waves form beautiful patterns, probably because the grains are different densities. Then there are the shiny, golden flecks of what look like pyrite.

Shorebirds at sunset (Robert: $50 if you can name the species from this photo).

The beach from our hotel balcony, with dunes in foreground.

Another view from the balcony.

The boys on the dunes--they're bigger up close than they seem in the distance. Jackets in the evening are a good idea--it's the desert, and it gets cool when the sun goes down.

Another view of the beach.

Oh, and did I mention that you can drive your car onto the beach? Seems to be the thing to do around here. Why walk a few hundred yards, when you can unload your cooler at the high tide line?

A view of the hotel from the high tide line. Notice the tire tracks in the sand.

Laura and I took long walks on the endless beach--when the beach was its most deserted. We saw pelicans diving, many varieties of shore birds poking their bills into the sand, sea gulls dropping clams onto the hard sand and eating the broken remains, and porpoises feeding offshore. No boats. Maybe a fisherman or clammer or two. Then a pickup truck with a bad muffler roaring by.

One final view of the beach, with the white hotel in the distance, one of the six volcanoes of San Quintín in the far distance, and scads of sand dollars on the sand in the foreground.

More about San Quintín in a subsequent post or two.