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We slept late yesterday, not leaving bed til after seven. “Late,” of course, has become a relative term, but since I’ve been up around five every morning since arriving, I think you’ll see why seven seemed luxurious.

My mother and I had coffee while watching the tide recede. With the full moon came the high tides. Because of the shape of Ensenada de La Paz, which is really, technically, a lagoon and not an ensenada (cove / bay), the tide sweeps diagonally toward El Comitan, and tide pools were left at the end of the road between my mother’s house and her neighbor. Calle 5 ends at the beach, so when I say “at the end of the road” I really mean “just outside their fences.” It has been higher, but rarely. My parents fence does not mark the end of their property, however, as they have a concession which means they own the beach itself. Down to the water.

In any case, we dressed, and drove to town, and then down the Malecon to pick up friends at one of the older, traditional Mexican waterfront hotels, Los Arcos. From there, we went to a “marina village” called Costa Baja, an upscale marina and resort, with restaurants, shops, and a shell museum. We ate at a place that combines Mexican food and Middle-Eastern flavors, and everything was delicious. My parents go there often and the owner knows them, and came out to say hello.

We browsed through the shell museum, falling in love with cone shells, one of which, Conus Litterati, looks very much like blurry text wrapped around a nautilus. It was beautiful. Half the museum is a collection of model ships – Fuzzy spent almost all his time there.

Next, we went to Balandra, which is about half an hour outside of La Paz, past Pichilingue where the ferries and big boats dock (the La Paz harbor is shallow, and cannot support full-sized cruise ships or the ferries to the mainland). Balandra is my favorite beach here. It’s a mixture of white sand and the normal coarser stuff, and it’s all sand bars. We got there at low tide – mud low. Low enough to walk across the sand bars to the opposite shore, though we weren’t dressed for the beach as it was “cold” here. (Gray and 71. My parents were in scarves and sweaters.)

As we arrived, a group of Mexican men started posing for my mother, Helen and me, mooning us good-naturedly, and making a fuss. They saw Fuzzy’s camera, and begged him for a picture, then pulled their long swim trunks up, tucking the legs under to make them look like speedos. Laughing and cat-calling, they stood reasonably still, and we snapped their image. They left, and my first response was, “I am SO blogging this.”

And now I have.