Well, we’ve been here a week. Which also means we’ve done a week of school. Miles really just wants to be in the ocean and Fin and Ollie want to be in the pool. But, we put a few hours in every morning and then we are off to the pool and/or beach. Juggling three kids’ lessons can be challenging but it’s amazing how much you can get done one-on-one. We usually do school in the attached palapa, but we’ve also done it at the pool, the beach and in the house too. It’s so fun to be flexible on what you do and where you do it.
We love Cerritos. It’s a small beach community, basically houses and condos, just south of Todos Santos. It’s one of the few safe swimming beaches on the Pacific side of Baja. There are two mini-supers (what we’d call a convenience store) here that have a few things and are open even fewer hours, so to stock up we go to Todos Santos, which is about 20 min. away, and we’ve made one run to Cabo, which is about 45 minutes away. There is also a small village on Hwy. 1 called Pescadero a couple miles away, but we have yet to explore it.
When we go to the beach we swim, boogie board on our new Costco boogie boards, and of course, surf. Miles has been out on a board that our friends in McCall loaned us and we’ve also rented some bigger foam boards that are easier to learn on. We were hoping to buy a big foam board that a bunch of people have told us about, called a Wave Storm, at Costco, but it turns out they only sell them in the summer.
Yesterday, Miles and Fin took their first surf lesson. Along the beach there are a few tents that rent boards and offer lessons. We went with WestSide Surf that is owned by two brothers, Carlos and Tancho. Tancho showed the kids some stuff on land and then two instructors took the kids out. Fin’s instructor was called Burrito and Miles had Jorge. I couldn’t believe how far out the instructors took them. And getting them past the break was crazy. You can’t really duck dive with the foam boards so the instructors would shoot the kids, laying on the boards, up into the breaking waves. They would go completely vertical and then slap down. Fin did go over backwards a couple times right into the surf. (FIN: Oh my gosh! You go straight up the wave and come straight down and it hurts when you hit! I’m pretty sure I landed right on top of Burrito a few times.) Both of them got up a lot and it was so fun seeing them catch waves. They were stoked!
