Baja 1000 November 12-16, 2012 (Part One)

Monday: KTM Corporate!!

We got on the road from San Diego as soon as rush hour was over.  KTM North American is located in Murrieta California. It was very cool to see all the logo vans and trucks in the parking lot.  KTM’s front reception area is all decked out with samples of all their logo gear and clothing, resembling a retail store. We got to see what  the new gear will look like.   All the people we met were really friendly and helpful.

Picking up the pit box was…interesting.  It was very chaotic, someone compared it to the military, you know “Hurry up and wait”.  Nothing was ready in advance; the boxes had to be put together as we waited.  None of the pit locations hadn’t even been chosen until a couple of days before we got there, so pit books with all the maps and directions had to be created that day.  Satellite phones had to be assigned and activated.   The pit boxes were not as big as we thought they might be which was good.  We also got wheels with tires mounted, KTM Flag and pit mat. And we were given two 5 gallon cans of race gas, and then told to hide it when we went over the border. Yipes! I guess you are not supposed to take gas into Mexico.  By 2 PM we had most of our stuff, but the radios were still in San Diego, so some of us were scheduled to meet the courier at North County Yamaha to pick them up.

We had found out earlier that we had pit #2 which was located much farther from Bob’s place in Santa Veronica than we originally planned.  Once we saw the pit on Google Earth we realized we would not be able to take our motorhome to the pit anyway.  Now we had some decisions to make.  Where were we going to stay if we didn’t take the coach?  Bob suggested his friend’s beach house in Cantamar which is located north of Ensenada. Along with his other friends Don and Joanne we planned to head to the beach house.  Wayne and I decided to be prepared to camp at the pit, as on the maps it looked pretty far from Cantamar and we had to be there at 7 am.  Annti who works for KTM said he took 4 hours to get from Ensenada to Ojos Negros on race day last year.  Our pit was the one AFTER Ojos Negros so we would have to leave closer to midnight and drive in the dark to get there.  So we went to Walmart and bought another sleeping bag and an air mattress.  We planned food that we could take with us and cook on the BBQ and borrowed a cooler from Bob.

Tuesday: Drive to Cantamar

Before we could leave to go to Cantamar we had to find a place to leave the coach, and the cats.  Bob’s daughter has a rental house in Lakeside (25 miles from Bob's house) with space to park the RV, so we drove up there, opened up the slides and settled the cats with extra water and food.  We figured we’d be back in 3 days, and they could be alone that long.  Then we went back to Bob’s and unloaded anything we figured we didn’t need, such as our bikes and bicycles, and repacked all the pit supplies into the trailer.  We also loaded up Bob’s BMW into the trailer so he and CoCo (his little dog) could ride with us. 

Thankfully the trip through Tijuana was uneventful, last time when Wayne went through that border he got very lost.  We breezed through this time and then onto the 1D toll road and down the coast to Cantamar.

The beach house was wonderful.  It had 4 Bed/Bath combos, a full kitchen, dining and living room as well as a dormitory with more beds. We were very lucky to be able to stay there.  The location was great, right on the beach with a wonderful restaurant just outside the gate. We ate there several times. I highly recommend the black bean soup and the buck-fifty Margaritas during Happy Hour!

 

 

                 We stayed in the yellow one                      

 

View from the deck off our room

Beautiful wooden doors in our room

Wednesday: Out to the Pit

 

 

We started the day by going to Bob’s favorite restaurant La Fonda for breakfast.  It is right on the beach about 5 miles from the beach house.  Not very busy for breakfast, but the head greeter was strutting his stuff.

 

 I didn’t have the heart to tell this guy that his harem was probably on the menu…

During breakfast we had a major scare.  Our new friend Don began having heart attack type symptoms. Very scary even in the US, it was awful in Mexico, none of us speak the language and the EMT’s never came.  We eventually loaded Don in the truck and took him to the Medico.  While they were running tests, Bob took us back to the beach house so we could prepare for our pit.  We loaded the rest of our stuff into the trailer, including the now inflated air mattress.  We didn’t have a generator and would need all the air tanks full for the pit, so we did that in advance. It turned out that Don had acute Acid Reflux, not heart failure, thank goodness.  Once he arrived back to the house and prepared to rest for the day, Bob, Wayne and I went out to check out our pit location.

We headed south on Highway 1D toward Ensenada.

We aren’t sure what are in these nets but the bay had a bunch of them.  I think it is some sort of sea ranching.

Ensenada was a zoo as vendors and racers show off their stuff for the public.

We managed to get lost trying to get through Ensenada.  Eventually we got headed in the right direction.  We had one Government Check Point to go through in this section. We didn’t have any trouble, but the truck going the other way appeared to be race related, and they were being detained.  Looked like the Federal’s had found some type of ammo in their truck.  This is a HUGE no-no in Mexico and we figured they were headed for jail.  Shudder!

It took us a while, about 4.5 hours from the beach house, to get to our pit.  Obviously we were not going to be able to sleep at the beach and make it to our pit by 7 am to set up.  Mexican roads, even the paved highways would not be fun in the dark. And imagine what a military check point would be like at night!!

So we made the decision to camp out.  Bob had his BMW in the trailer, and he went back to the beach house to help with Don, just in case.  Here it was about 4:30 PM and he had to ride all the way back to Catamar, although I doubt it took him the 4+ hours we used getting there.  He decided to bail on helping at the check.  That left just Wayne and me to do all three jobs.  Oh well, it worked.

Our check point was located about 4 miles off the highway, on what used to be a gravel road to Santa Catarina.  It was in the middle of being rebuilt in concrete.  We knew it was under construction, but we didn’t expect to come to a 8-12” step up from the gravel to the concrete, no ramp built or anything.  And there were 15-18” deep gutters that were cut in a deep narrow V on either side of the road.  When we found the course (farther from the highway than our pit book indicated) we were not pleased.  The construction crew had not created a good way to get onto the dirt road that was the course.  We had to get our truck and trailer through that ditch.  As it turned out, the racers kicked up and drug enough dirt from the course to fill that in by the time it was over, so getting out was easier than getting in.  Next year it might not be an issue.

We expected there to be a crowd, you know, other pits set up?  No such luck.  We were the only ones there. Good news, we had all the room we needed to get set up. Bad news, we were going to be camping alone in the boonies of Mexico.  It’s one of those things you always hear, don’t camp alone.  We do it all the time in the US, but this is Mexico and it is not a good idea. Yes, I was a little freaked out.  We tried to camp where headlights would not reflect off the truck, but still…  So we ate dinner, watched the sun go down and did a little star gazing.  That took us to about 6 PM.  Too early to sleep, but dark enough to want to be locked up in the trailer.  We stayed up reading until 8 and then tried to sleep.  We were surprised at how much traffic was on a road that only goes to this little village.  The locals were hauling butt down this road in the dark.  They would wake us up, you could hear them coming, seemed like they were doing 90 MPH.  Me, I’d lie there going ”please don’t stop, please don’t stop, please don’t stop.” And they would blow right by.  The troop carriers (yes the army went by routinely) would rumble down the road.  I didn’t want them to stop either.  At that point I was still frightened by the army boys.