Puerto Penasco Day 3 (Sunday, April 30th, 2017)

We all sat around camp this morning drinking coffee and having a little breakfast, just taking it easy and enjoying the beautiful weather here in Puerto Penasco. At about 10:30 Tony and Joyce left for their Tee-time at the Vidanta Golf Resort. Steve and I headed into town on foot. It is about 2 miles to town from our RV park. 

The beaches are beautiful and really clean.

When you leave the beach area, there is a shortcut through a corridor on the side of this hotel to get into town.

The little green sign behind Steve says "beach access".  It's not real obvious, so you have to pay attention.

Once we found our walking access to town, the rest was easy!  To get to the Malecon, you have to walk out and around the harbor, but that only adds a few extra blocks.  Not a big deal, and the harbor is pretty.

We were amazed at how many empty buildings there were in the town. We saw one building that looked like a huge construction project, mostly out of brick, but the construction of it probably stopped during the down-turn of the economy in 2008 or 2009. A movie theater was thriving upstairs, but everything else was completely empty and deteriorating rapidly. 





 It was sad to see. Their economy is pretty depressed right now. 

We continued our walk to the Malecon and had lunch at one of the restaurants overlooking the Sea of Cortez. Again, there was no signage for the restaurant at all, a waiter showed us a menu on the street and we gave it a try. We liked it even more than the restaurant we ate at yesterday.  

We enjoyed watching the birds along the shore and the fishing boats going in and out in the harbor.

Our table couldn't have been better!

And the food was fabulous!  We ordered a whole fried fish to share.  It came with roasted jalepenos, fresh cucumber, rice, pico-de-gallo and limes.  It's probably the best fish I've ever eaten! 

In my very broken Spanish, I asked the waiter what kind of fish we were eating…Que tipo de pescado es este? He yelled to one of the other workers in very quick Spanish, then finished his sentence with “What kind”. I laughed at how they interchange their English and Spanish in a single sentence. 

I think we liked it!

The fried fish platter was only $9.00, and beers were $2.00 each. Hard to beat a great meal for that price.  

We are finding it harder than we thought to break up our $20 bills.  Next time we visit we plan to bring lots of $1's and $5's.  It will just make everything so much easier!  Also good idea to do some money exchanging as we are getting 15 pesos to the dollar and the exchange rate around town is 17+.

The name of this restaurant was Mariscos El Malecon, although I don't think there was an actual sign for it anywhere.  This is a picture of Steve coming down the stairs from that restaurant.

It's right by the statue.

The police were setting up on the Malecon for some sort of festival.  I asked them what it was, and they said the Festival of Children.  They had D.A.R.E (dare to keep kids off drugs campaign) posters, so I'm sure it had something to do with that.

We saw this guy out padding in his little fold out boat.  It appeared that his motor had died.  We weren't sure how far he had paddled back in, but he was making good progress and was right by town, so we weren't too concerned.  It turned out that about 4 hours later back at camp, he finally rowed in to our RV Park.  He was out for a really long time.  Poor guy!

Further back in town, we saw a shop that I described as a Mexican hoarder shop. It was so full of stuff that you could hardly walk through it. It was amazing!

They had some really fun stuff if you could get past the clutter.

As we walked back past the harbor, this boat was heading out with a live band on board.  They we're really jamming out to the band that was on the boat.  It was definitely too much for me!



As we made our way back to Sandy Beach, we saw these two boys who were playing songs for tips.  I was amazed at their enginuity, and they played really well.  The drum was a old oil drum, and the tuba was a plastic jug with a plastic hose leading out of it. Most kids in the U.S. have no interest in playing a real instrument, and yet these boys have hand crafted instruments just so they can play.



It was family day for locals. They all headed to the beach after church, so the beach became very busy. It was kind of interesting in that none of the locals wore swimwear, they just went out in the surf in their clothes. It looked extremely uncomfortable to us, but it’s just what they do. I’m sure that they don’t understand Americans in our swimwear either.

There was a lot of laughter on the beach today, and it was so nice to see all of the families having such a great time.

It appears that some of the people in our RV park are here pretty permanently.  They have truly made it feel like home.

And this little guy seemed to feel very at home as well.  Such a cute little adventure cat!

While we were out seeing the town and enjoying the locals, Tony and Joyce were taking in the beautiful sights of the golf course and hitting some balls as well.

Can you believe how beautiful this place is?  They only saw a few other couples while they were playing and they were never rushed at all.  I think that's what we call paradise!

When Tony and Joyce got back from golfing, they were starving, so we headed back to Penasco Del Sol for dinner. 





Steve had the seven seas soup and I had the penasco Del Sol fish. It was perfect except that it had a lot of butter, which I didn't realize when I ordered it. I’ll have to figure out a healthier version in my own kitchen. We ventured out tonight with our drink orders, Steve had a bloody Mary and I had a margarita instead of our usual beer. They were OK, but pretty small for the $4 price, so next time we’ll just stick with Dos xx for $3.

This was my fish tonight.  It was really good, but just too much butter for me!

Another fabulous day in Puerto Penasco, and another wonderful dinner with great friends.  We're having so much fun down here with them!