Living in La Paz

We’re still on our boat but we’ve settled into Marina de La Paz and plan on staying here for awhile, which means at the present we have no plans to leave. We’re no good at making plans let alone following them so we didn’t sign any long term lease, we just told the owner that we’d like to stay for maybe a year to which he said ‘OK’.

We brought the car down to La Paz after our little trip up to the States in July. We flew up to Boise and then Seattle, saw lots of family, and then drove a u-haul truck packed with all our stuff from storage from Anacortes to Tucson. Now days we have few reasons to call Anacortes “home” other than it’s our legal residence in the States, so we decided to move our stuff to Tucson to be closer to us as we travel around Mexico. Linda’s son lives in Tucson and we go up enjoy his hospitality often so that’s a good place to store our stuff.

After the move to Tucson we drove our ‘93 Jeep Grand Cherokee down Baja to La Paz. We made the trip in 3 days with no problems but there are some spots where the road is narrow, the fall off is steep and the trucks are wide and you just hope everyone moves in the right directions at the right time so that everyone comes out the other side unharmed. It’s fun having a car in La Paz, we’re getting out and seeing areas that we never did before and grocery shopping is so much easier with a car.

When we left Tucson, the Jeep had a slow oil leak from the back of the transmissions and estimates to fix it were around $1200+. When we got to La Paz the leak had gone from slow to a noticeable puddle every night so we found a local ‘shade tree’ mechanic recommended by people in the marina. 3 days latter he had replaced the rear transmission seal, installed new motor mounts, replaced the bearings in the rear differential, and put on new rear brakes. Total cost, with parts - $425. After a month everything is still working and there’s no more puddles of oil so it  looks like he did a good job. There was one small issue, he seemed to have loosened a fitting on the Air Conditioner causing the A/C gas to leak out. He denied he did it so we took the car to another ‘shade tree’ shop where they do A/C work and they recharged the system for $35. Kind of a hassle but no big deal.

 

This is Lupe, the mechanic who did the major work on our car in his shop next to his house.