We made it into downtown San Ignacio by noon. We had a little trouble figuring out how to use the phones and how to call Alberto. The phone number had some prefixes on it that are the equivalent of long distance area codes and we didn’t know what parts of the number to drop off and which parts to keep. Penny begged a local girl to come help us and of course it worked on the first try for her. To the incomprehensible greeting when the phone answered I replied “Donde Alberto?” and Alberto’s daughter immediately replied in English “You want to speak to Alberto? PAPA”! Alberto directed us to his parent’s house and we were soon sitting under an awning making our final plans. We suggested that Alberto could save a little gas by driving a car to Santa Rosalia and leaving his truck in San Ignacio. While he was shuttling the drivers there and back the rest of the group would figure out how to strap all the kayaks onto the rack on Alberto’s big stake truck, saving us from having to do that in the morning.
We went to have lunch and make reservations at a nearby restaurant for the evening. Then we unloaded all our gear from the trucks so Bob and I could drive them to Santa Rosalia. This took entirely too long and we left with the expectation of coming back late. Alberto lead us not directly to Santa Rosalia, but to a fish camp 10 miles north of town. This fish camp solved a lot of problems. Leaving our cars there cut our trip short by 10 miles, but these were 10 developed miles where Highway One ran close to shore. We wanted to paddle wilderness and didn’t need to do this stretch. Alberto knew a fishing family that lived in the fish camp and made arrangements with them to watch our trucks. It was a remote location, 6 miles up a dirt road, where thieves would be unlikely to notice our rigs. A man named Jose had retired to the fish camp and would be there 24 hours a day to watch our stuff. Not only that but they let us park the trucks partway under an awning in front of an unused shack, hiding them from view and from the sun.
The trip back to San Ignacio turned into more of an adventure than we expected. Alberto was driving his father’s pick-up truck and it had problems with the carburetor. Up hills it ran very rough and threatened to stall. It got terrible gas mileage and almost didn’t make it back on the gas we had put in it! At one point Alberto pulled over and stuck a piece of hose into the tank to measure how little was left and decided that we would make it. And he was right! When we got back the engineering problem of how to strap all the kayaks on Alberto’s truck had been solved long ago, but we were still in time to join everyone else for dinner. Then we crashed in our motel rooms.