I loved La Cruz. I cannot overstate how much I loved La Cruz. It was by far my favorite town we have visited so far in Mexico, which is saying a lot. Admittedly, I think Santa Rosalia would be a closer second if it weren’t so bloody hot while we were there making it so much harder to enjoy, but it would still come in second. La Cruz was a smallish town in the midst of the larger bustling greater Puerto Vallarta area. (Not unlike El Segundo in the midst of the greater Los Angeles area, but on a smaller scale, of course.) It is large enough to find most things you might need, but still smaller than La Paz or Loreto. There are several medium sized tiendas that had most canned and dry goods you might need and enough good restaurants and street side taco stands that I often got a reprive from preparing dinner. One of the tiendas held a vegetable market twice a week where you could score plenty of apples, pears, broccoli, green beans, and bell peppers, which was such a welcome chage.
Tim, Brenden, and I were able to get our teeth cleaned by a local dentist, and there was a guy who drove around in a truck in the evening selling fresh baked bread (thanks to Kyle for this great find).
Staying in La Cruz, I had the luxury of shopping just a couple days at a time, just like at home, rather than running around provisioning like a mad woman whenever we were in a town so we would be well stocked for weeks. Of course, I eased into it. One of our first days we went to the vegetable market and I loaded up with as much stuff as I could carry, and Carolina laughed at me saying, “you know, they have this twice a week.” One of the treats of La Cruz is the fish market. Not that we ever need to buy our own fish (thank you to my three expert fishermen crew mates) but the fish market had shrimp, and I mean I’m pretty sure it was the best shrimp I’ve ever had. Of course, at home I would buy it de-veined and often shelled as well, so this shrimp took a lot more effort on my part than I’m used to. (Yes, that is a common theme living on a sailboat.) As I was in the middle of the deveining process I was thinking, well, this is the last time we have this. I changed my mind after the first bite, and I didn’t even do anything fancy with it. Just a little butter and garlic, but wow, what great flavor the shrimp has. Best. Shrimp. Ever.
OK, enough about the shrimp. Let’s talk about the kids. First of all, we were able to reconnect with Fluenta, one of the kid boats we spent the early summer with (see the essay I wrote called “The Baja Kid Boat Flotilla”). Their kids are younger than Alex and Brenden, but the boys adore them. And I have a particular soft spot for Victoria, who is 10 going on 25 and reminds me of a non-shy version of myself at that age. We also met several other kid boats, including Kenta Anae who have been living on their boat in La Cruz and have 2 boys about Brenden’s age, Matero and Shandro. Fortunately, we also met a kid boat with some older kids (12 year old girl and 14 year old boy), Sand Dollar, so Alex and Kyle had a few more peers to hang out with. In fact, although there is only a year between Brenden and Alex, it is a tremendous year at their current ages. Alex gravitated to the older kids, and Brenden is still as playful as ever and spent most of his time with the younger kids, not getting into any sort of mischief, I’m sure.
I mentioned restaurants earlier, so here’s my quick review of all the places we ate:
Tacos on the Street – Great tacos BUT they only have steak and they don’t let you bring your own beer/wine anymore (Oh, the horror!)
Red Chairs – Again, great tacos and a wider variety AND they let you bring your own beer/wind AND it’s closer to the marina. Win!Los Twins – All the same as Red Chairs AND they are a really nice young couple with, yes, you guessed it, twins, a boy and a girl. Double Win!
Charlie’s pizza – Good pizza and burgers, hockey on the TV (not the Kings, though), nice atmosphere, and cats that will jump in your lap while you eating (whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your perspective, I guess)
Gecko Rojo – Excellent burgers. Enough said.
Philo’s – Mediocre pizza, but they showed the 49ers game, so Tim was happy. And we found out the Carolina complained about her pizza there, and they gave her a coupon for free pizza. Ironic.
Frascati – It is a large Italian restaurant in the middle of town at the roundabout, and it is the second time we’ve come close to fine dining in Mexico. The food and service were excellent, and so were the mango margaritas, even if pricy. The atmosphere was nice as well. We only ate there once, and if we ever went again we’d leave the kids on the boat to eat top ramen.
I had a love/hate relationship with the La Cruz Sunday Market. It was one part farmer’s market, one part craft market, and one part tourist trap where everything is overpriced and the real target consumers are the people from the cruise ships that they bus down from Puerto Vallarta. The first time we went I was slightly hung over and even though we were warned that you should go early, we got there right around noon, two hours after it started. The place was so packed you could barely maneuver along the walkway that was wedged between the fish market and the water. It was a wonderful venue for such a market, but the people crowding me from all directions made it almost unbearable. There were, however, some treasures to be found, which kept me coming back whenever we were in town. These are in order starting with my most favorite: 1) Fresh squeezed orange juice. Maybe it was the hang over but the cup of OJ I got that first time was like a little slice of heaven. 2) Empanadas. Mushroom, Spinach, cheese. I would eat them cold and enjoy every bite. 3) Sausage and ham sandwiches. These were about 3000 calories each and they were worth it. You could spice them up as much or as little as you want. 4) Baguettes. There weren’t a lot of baguettes in Baja, so these were savored (we later found you could also get them at Mega and from the bread guy, but our first baguettes from the market were unforgettable. 5) Honey. I never actually bought a full jar of honey because it was a little expensive, but they sold it in straws that you could suck on for a little treat, and I think Alex enjoyed these the most. 6) Coffee. OK, I’m pushing it a little here because I bought some coffee beans and it was good but nothing special, I just REALLY liked buying local coffee. I felt like I was at home back on my buy local kick.
The La Cruz marina was pretty enjoyable. I have to point out that before La Cruz the only marinas we had stayed at in Mexico were government run Fonatur marinas (Santa Rosalia and San Felipe), so this was our first time in a real commercial marina. We wanted to be on dock 11 with Fluenta and Kenta Anae, so they put us in this huge mega yacht slip where Exodus looked like a small panga. It turned out to be a bonus because we pulled Exodus all the way forward in the slip and the extra dock behind us became a dinghy dock for our friends still in the anchorage. The shore power worked and there was hot water in the showers, but nothing is without it’s story. The shore power worked UNTIL a particular mega yacht pulled in and plugged in and then all of a sudden our reverse polarity light would go on, and after I convinced Tim that this time the light really is on and it’s not just the light from one of the other indicators showing through. It took us a few occurrences to nail it down to that particular mega yacht and by then we only had a day or two left in the marina. We told the marina guys, but who knows what they did about it. What we should have done was tell the guys on the culprit yacht, but we are too shy and lack initiative to do something like that. Or maybe we just didn’t think of it. As for the showers, on our first day everyone was telling us there was no hot water, but I still really needed a shower, and if I took it on the boat it would be cold water anyway, so I might as well have a high pressure cold water shower at the marina. But then the water turned luke warm, then warm, then hot, then scalding hot, and I was in absolute heaven. I felt guilty having hot water when others didn’t so I did shut the spigot off when I was soaping up and such, but the surprise of getting hot water when I thought I was in for a cold shower was immensely pleasurable. And this kept happening. People kept saying the hot water was off, and I kept getting hot showers. I don’t know if I was just lucky or others didn’t know how to work the shower knobs or what. The knobs were pretty straightforward in that hot is the direction you expect, so I suspect it was the former.
The marina offered wifi to your boat, but we never did have much luck with that. Funny, in the anchorage we could pick up internet from Exodus for free from a nearby resort, but once in the marina the best wifi to be had was in the “VIP lounge.” It was air conditioned, so I likely would have gone up there even if we could have picked up the wifi from the boat. I would take the computer, my ipad, and my iphone and do some severe multi-tasking while enjoying the highest speed internet we’ve had in Mexico. The marina had a “pool” and I put that in quotes because it was one of the smallest pools I’ve ever seen. It was an actual hole in the ground, though, and it was safe to go into, unlike the Fonatur pools, so maybe I’m being a little unfair with my quotes. There was a little store by the pool that was going through a re-opening, and they had a potluck event where the store provided free beer, so Tim and I showed up, drank a couple beers, and were our usual anti-social selves and left right away. The kids dominated the pool with a bit of volleyball, however, it wasn’t the usual group of kids, and Alex was the only one who joined in. I watched for a little while, and he seemed to be having a lot of fun.
Laundry in La Cruz is easy peasy. (A quick aside… this certainly says something about the cruising lifestyle when how you get your laundry done is often a blog feature.) There are several lavanderias in town where you drop off and pick up and there is even a service from the marina where you just leave your laundry at the VIP lounge by 6pm and it gets delivered to your boat at 6pm the following evening. But as luck would have it we arrived on a Saturday, and the service isn’t available on weekends, so we carted laundry into town to the first one we found that could have it ready that day (it was sheets, and it’s always better not to have to wait until the next day to get sheets back, because then you have to remember where the spare sets of sheets are and dig them out). It was not the closest one, but Gaila did a good job, so we stayed loyal to her throughout our stay in La Cruz. One day when I picked up laundry she handed me back some extra pesos. It took a little while for my broken spanish skills to understand that the boys dropped the money when the were last there, and she remembered which boys belonged to me so she returned the money. After that display of honesty, we definitely stayed loyal to her. One of the things I really miss for the boys are organized sports and other after school activities that they did at home.
Out here, there’s no baseball, soccer, karate classes or Vintage Canvas to paint with a group. Out here, it’s mostly just our boys and the Lady Carolina boys (and other kids now and then) running around doing fun, but not all that structured, activities. So, I was really happy when they had the opportunity to go to “silks class” in La Cruz. Kenta Anae had mentioned it to us a couple times, and admittedly I had no idea what “silks class” was, and I envisioned some sort of sewing or arts and crafts. Picture Cirque du Soleil with acrobats climbing flowing silk lines and doing all sorts of daring and breathtaking tricks and maneuvers. Although, since the boys were just beginners, there was quite a bit of daring involved but no so much breathtaking. There is a restaurant/coffee shop up near the main road called Jardin del Pulpo (Octopus’s Garden) and they had a silks setup in their top room where Mary Jo gives lessons to adults and kids. The boys seemed to like it, but that probably had a lot to do with just hanging out with their buddies. But they had to pay attention and do what they were told in some organized fashion, so it was a good experience. I also took the boys to one of the shows that featured Mary Jo, and while she is quite talented, Cirque du Soleil, it was not.
Overall, we stayed in La Cruz longer than we ever thought we would, and it we kept coming back for more, but if you are going to be tethered to somewhere for awhile because you are in need of civilization, there are far worse places you could be.
Gresham Family Exodus 