Slow Baja - Lynn Chenowth On Building Cars And His Beautiful Legacy Lodge And Museum

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Lynn Chenowth is a pioneer off-road chassis and vehicle builder whose factory-backed and private Chenowth cars have taken many of the sport's greatest drivers to off-road racing's biggest victories. The list includes ORMHOF inductees Johnny Johnson, Ivan Stewart, Corky and Mark McMillin, Bob and Robby Gordon, Frank 'Butch' Arciero Jr, and Rob MacCachren. In the 1970s, Chenowth helped usher in the development of true tube frame off-road vehicles. The sport was quickly growing and evolving, and Chenowth Racing Products was ready to meet the need. With a mass-production approach to building affordable chassis and products, Chenowth helped bring the sport of recreational off-roading to the masses. -Excerpted from his 2019 ORMHOF Induction Ceremony I spoke to Lynn in July during my Summer podcast recording trip. We recorded at his home in Percebu, South of San Felipe, the morning after I spent the night at his Chenowth Legacy Lodge. Check out the Chenowth Legacy Lodge on Facebook Follow Lynn Chenowth on Facebook

Hey, before we jump into this week's show with Lynn Chenith, Lynn is an off-road motorsports Hall of Famer. Hello, Barbara Rainey. You just had your big event last week. He is a lifelong gearhead met Johnny Johnson, another off-road Motorsports Hall of Famer when they're in high school students and they've been fooling around with buggies in the dirt and doing fun stuff. So this one's kind of for the gearhead. So my new Nora 500 friends, Ryan, Hudson, Isaac, this one's for you guys. Hope you enjoy it. If you're not a gearhead, well, I hope you still enjoy hearing some good stories about Baja on off-roading, and I'll be back with something for you, non-gearheads, on the next show. All right, enjoy this one. And hey, check out the Legacy Lodge, the Chenet Legacy

Lodge down in Perseboo. I spent a night down there as a beautiful spot, big private beach, 25 miles south of San Felipe, so it's really in a tranquil. I call it the Beverly Hills of Baja. It's really in a tranquilo setting down there. Highly recommended, Slow Baja approved. All right, on with the show. Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza,

handmade and small batches and hands down my favorite tequila. Hey, I want to tell you about your new must-have accessory for your next Baja trip. Benchmark Maps has released a beautiful, beautiful Baja California Road and Recreation Atlas. It's a 72-page large format book of detailed maps and recreation guides that makes the perfect planning tool for exploring Baja. Pick yours up at benchmarkmaps.com. So I'm just going to ask you to introduce yourself so I can kind of dial you in here. Tell me your name. Nathan Lynn, Cheneth.

Well, Lynn, I do a general interest podcast conversation show with people who've done interesting things in Baja, and you've done a hell of a lot of interesting stuff here. but my listeners may not know the intricacies of your legendary status in the off-road world. So I'm going to ask you to brag. Do you mind just jumping into saying like you, so you, we talked a little bit. You got to San Diego at the end of the war when your dad came in. And how did you become the guy that you became? Where did it all come from?

Where did it start? well I moved to we lived here in San Diego for a while and then my parents got divorced when I was about eight years old third grade which I wound up flunking

went to third grade twice but then my my dad moved back east east from here Albuquerque, New Mexico so I grew up up, you know, between San Diego and Albuquerque.

So whenever I wasn't getting my way with one of them, I'd run away to the other, right? And so I was back and forth a few times. But my moved out here as a senior, and I met Johnny Johnson in Otto's Shop. Fertuitous meeting. Now lives two doors away. How many years later?

50, 60 years later? Well, 57, 8? I'm 77 and so I was about 17, so, you know, 60 years. 60 years. Okay, so 60 years ago, set in the scene, you met Johnny Johnson auto shop. And he had a dune buggy. I was building a dune, you know, I don't know what the hell a dune buggy was. They didn't have dune buggies in New Mexico.

So we become quick buddies because always, always a car nut. My dad was a car nut. And growing up in Albuquerque, we'd go to Speedway Park. We watched the Uncers start their careers there. And so I've become a fan of racing just like my dad was. So that got me interested. And when I got here, me and Johnny were gearheads, as they call them now. And so we started working on his dune buggy in auto shop.

And what was that powered by? Flathead Ford. Okay. And at that time later, of course, the Volkswagen came along. And not too many years after that, I guess three or four years, and they were going with Johnny to the desert. and the Volkswagen buggy, which, you know, was just a cut down, you know, was a pan, what we call a tunnel buggy, you know. Just popped the body off and cut all the stuff off.

And we set the seats all the way back on the torsion housing, just had a single roll bar on it. And like 36 horse motor, you know, we could, if we got a little run, we could hit a whoop and pop a wheelie with it. And Johnny could drive it around. the thing was balanced really good. We could drive it around in a wheelie with a cutting brake. And if it fell over backwards, the roadcar stopped it from going all the way back over on us. So, you know, we were pretty brave. Pretty brave.

Yeah, that'd be a good way of putting it. I mean, we had a crowd around that thing. Nobody had it at the desert. Johnny had been up to Pismo and seen a Volkswagen. And he came down here and built one. And we took it. And, of course, nobody down here in Southern California, in Southern Southern California, You, Glamas and the Ocatea Wells where we ran at the time.

I never seen one. We had a crowd around that thing the whole time. We were there. And that's, you know, pretty soon he wound up putting the Corvair motor in. They had the first Barago Rough 100 that Johnny entered in and won with his Corvair motor, and that kind of set him off on his racing history. history. It was a lot of fun, though.

We'd hit the desert every weekend, drive over there and, you know, goof off, drink beer. And matter of fact, that's how I, I had a tunnel buggy. I got a tunnel buggy from Mike Tacoma. Mike Tacoma was the guy that invented the white spoke wheel. Okay. He was high school buddies with Johnny Johnson. He was a year ahead of me.

Johnny's a few months over me, but we were in the same grade, obviously. So I was out, I had this buggy, I traded it, like I say, I can't forget if I gave Mike the flame cutter and he gave me his buggy, or it was the other way around. But anyway, I wound up with the buggy. And we were out partying and drinking, you know, driving. And back then your feet just set out on that little fly. You know, there's no side rails or nothing. So I go around the corner, my leg hops out and hits the ground.

My foot hits the ground and goes back. I could say if I wasn't careful, the knobs on the tire would hit my elbow. That's how far back we sat, you know. Not dangerous at all. My foot, my leg went under the car. I ran over myself. Luckily, I hit my brain. With my right foot, I was able to hit the brake.

I was halfway out the crack of the fiberglass seat was up to crack of my butt. And my leg, when I slammed on the brake, my knee just, see that scar right there? It just ground all of the meat off of it. And came to a stop, though, didn't, you know, it wasn't no big deal. The next morning I was there with a toothpick picking the rocks out of my knee and Linda, Johnny's wife, Linda came over and she said, you know, oh man, you gotta get the doctor right. And she just, you know, kept on and on about it.

So we went in Bell Central there and I got some stitch, picked all the rocks out of it and got some stitches in it. And that put me on disability. I was a ship fitter at National Steel at the time. And so I put me on disability. And so when I was on disability, I started building header. I took on some header jobs. I had built a few sets of headers for myself.

So by the time I got time to go back to work, I had all this work lined up, and I've never been back to work yet. So, I just, you know, it's a good thing when you can make a living out of your hobby. You know, like I say, you never work a day in your life and that's kind of how it worked for me. So obviously you had some mechanical aptitude, you had some tools and you were figuring it out and you're producing quality work that people wanted and told their friends and they wanted it and so you've had this accident in this buggy.

When did you start deciding that we're going to make these things safer and I'm going to engineer these these buggies? Well that was, of course, that was in my mind because if they had side rails on it at the time, my leg couldn't have popped out, you know. Or a full roll gauge or a what, you know, what have you, yes, of course. Roll the roll, yeah, just the rails, but we just had a single hoop. So it wasn't until So a few years later, I had started my header business, you know, building, I wasn't building

buggies, I was building headers. And then I just seemed, you know, there was a market. The pans were getting hard to find and they were asking a lot of money for them. My cousin loaned me five grand and I bought this Pines Mandrill Tube Bender. and started building tube chassis. And I made them in a kit or welded. I sold the kits for 100 bucks. They're all notched and bent and colored-coated

and you could lay them out on the floor and I showed them how to line them out. Without a jig, you could build this thing. Quite easily, really. Very popular. I wound up selling some 25,000 of them. Buggies and, you know, race cars. And that's, then I sold the company to Mike in 82 or so, and I don't know how many more he sold,

you know, after that. But, no, I had sold 22,000 by the time I sold the company to Mike and then he did the rest. And I don't have those numbers exactly. But there's a bunch of them out there. So, Lynn, what? When did you start racing in the desert? Because we had a brief conversation.

You said, oh, that's the first time when Johnny and George Plypton were racing and they were making that film. I was racing in that race. That was 1971. Right. So when did you actually start racing desert races yourself? Well, that was my first race. Okay, because you're building the chassis. You're building the buggies.

You've got the kits out there. So you're a... I'm right to frame. Yeah. Yeah, you're an engineer, a parts provider, what happens? But when did you make the leap and decide to get behind the wheel? In 71. I drove that year, but, you know, and never really drove much after that.

I mean, it was, I wanted to build cars, you know. There was money to be made doing that time. I didn't see it cost money to go racing or, I mean, Johnny was brilliant at it. I mean, he's the only guy I knew that he's made money racing all his life, you know. life, you know. 112 wins you told me today. Yeah. There's got to be one good story in that is what you said.

For a forever win, at least. Johnny's got the stories. I'll tell you. So that's an interesting way of putting it. You made money building cars. It cost money to go racing. That's a pretty simple equation. Well, it was like a druggy, you know.

You're either the user or the dealer. I decided to want to be the dealer. That's, yeah, I get it. Yeah. So I want to make a living on doing something that, uh, But, you know, that I like doing. And that was a definite market in there and it was exciting. Yeah, you saw a period of time that there was explosive growth in off-roading.

From that first race in 67 on to, you know, through the 70s and 80s, it was a boom. Yep, that it was. That it was. It ain't doing bad today either. No, it's amazing. Amazing. It's hard to imagine the money that's in it now. It's back then the average construction workers,

generally made a little, they formed most of the buggy crowd, the race crowd, you know. They're in construction somehow or another that could afford to do it. Even though it wasn't that expensive, I think our first entry fees were $100 at the Brago Rough 100. And I don't know, just went for that. I never really, I raced a couple other times, a short course at, you know, I raced riverside once in the car, mid-engine car that I had built and later sold Bob Rudin, which become the jack

in the box car, which is a, you know, pretty famous car that people remember from back then. So let's transition to, when did you start coming to Baja? Because you were riding around in the deserts around Southern California, Glamas and Ocetea Wells. When did you get south of the border? Well, 70, when I raced 71, that was the first time, I think I'd really, I had never been, I'd never been to Ensonata when race started in Sonata, you know. It was okay, it's that way, here's your map and just follow the pink ribbons, you know,

or, you know, or what, I don't remember what color there were, no, but they're just just ribbons tied on bushes all the way down, you know. And you just got in and went, you know. Quite an adventure. And since it stands out, we got, we made a wrong turn along the way, wound up at a ranch, asking the guy, you know, directions where, you know, we realized it was a dead end road when we got there and that we had to go back. And the guy, wait a minute, you know,

of course he was speaking in Spanish and he hollers to his kids come running out. You know, I don't know, they're six, seven years old, you know, and he's telling them they were gringles. They'd never seen. Men from the moon. Men from the moon. You were in race suits with helmets on.

So Mike Perelman was telling me about the early days in setting up those race courses and one year tying his job to tie all those ribbons and whatever the product was it was soy-based and the wild burrows ate all the ribbons Oh really?

So his dad I haven't heard that. His dad thought that he was sleeping on the job He was pleading, no dad I tied them all on, I did the job but they later figured out that the burrows were eating them. I'll be damn. So those early days

you know you living in San Diego, high school kid, you never got to Tijuana. You were a good kid and stayed away? Oh, we went to Tijuana, you know, to party a few times or go to donkey shows and stuff, you know, back in the day. That was a, so I never seen, you know, they said it was one I don't know if it ever really existed, but that's what we'd always say.

Kids are going to have the donkey show Wikipedia link in the show notes. For the record, I heard there was donkey shows in the 80s and I never saw one either. So again, you're in a new terrain. You're heading down to Ensonado. You're getting started in this race. What happened when you were driving through Baja? I don't need to know the race results, but what happened when you start seeing this terrain in this country and this place

that made you say, today, this is where you are? This is where you've built your home and your lodge and your museum. That didn't really happen until the 90s. I didn't. We built a minimag. And we raced it down here at one of Lou Peralta's races. And he had the ward ceremony just down here, a few houses from where I am now. And I came here and seen this and see this house here was for sale, wasn't for sale, but

I told the landlord, God, if something comes for sale, let me know, you know. Yeah, I made a joke earlier. This is the Beverly Hills of Baja right here. It's a pretty nice strip. You said that all these places have freshwater wells. Yes, yes. Between the Southern Aurora and the Northern Rory, this whole area, there's water at 33 feet. Fresh water flowing into the ocean so it's not salty.

You know, you can drink it. It's good, fresh mountain spring. It's the same, comes out of the same aquifer that feeds San Felipe, about five or six miles back on the old Porteus Highway. is the soil, you know, it's where the wells are anyway for San Felipe. And so it just flows right down through here. You can look out here right now, see the, see those streams? Yeah, no. See the water going back to the ocean?

I was walking through them this morning trying to figure out where the water was coming from because it was coming from the high part of the beach and running down to the sea. Well, people think it's just the sand has soaked it up and not slow tide and the salt water is running back out, but that's not the case. It's the fresh water. So if you're driving along here and you see that, you know there's water. Well, seeing all the trees on your property shows me that there's water here.

Well, I've had this place here for 35 years. It's beautiful. It really is. Haiti, wish you had joined us on the Nora 500? Well, here is your chance. It's double the mileage, double the fun, double the parties, double the dirt. It is the Nora Mexican 1000. We're going to drive by day.

We're going to party by night. I'm pouring shots. Fortaleza Tequila, April 30th through May 6th, 2022. We're driving the entire peninsula. You don't want to miss out on this one. Again, if I can do it in my 1971 Toyota Land Cruiser, totally stocked, you can do it in any modern 4x4. The Nora Mexican 1000 is the happiest race on Earth.

Check it out at nora.com, n-r-r-r-a-com or on Slow Baja. So we're going through the 80s now, And you've achieved a lot of success as a builder. If people want to win Baja in the buggies, they're winning with your chassis. They're winning with your cars. Well, back in those days, that was the case, you know, up until Robbie Gordon came along. Robbie was driving his father's car, Bob's car, and he was, you know, the guy to beat, you know, he's just 10% faster. There's been guys over the ages that have just stood out, you know, like Bob.

Bobby Farrow and Jack Johnson and Robbie were just heads and shoulders over the other guys, just faster is all you could say. And I lost track. Where was I going on this story? You were just saying that in that period I had mentioned that if people were winning, they were winning in your cars and you built a lot of them. Well, we did. We did.

And we, once you, the nice thing about that. advantage of being a builder and producing a lot of cars you get a lot of feedback you know so you figure out how to get on top of it you know you know make a lighter stronger car that doesn't break I mean that's the goal hold how the car ridges enough that it doesn't break hold all the four corners together but all the feedback from a lot of guys you could you could tune your car out quicker so I once I got out there I got ahead of them and they never really caught up.

You were always open to evolve. Make it better, make it better, better. Better, better. That's always been my, the goal. There's always, that's the fun part. You know, for a builder designers, okay, what's next,

you know? Can you explain desert racing to people who haven't seen it, experienced it, what have you? I mean, it's... No. it's pretty tough why in the hell would you want to do that isn't it hot

but you just you have to take it's an adrenaline deal and it's solitude and the beauty I mean there's a I used to my parents used to say isn't this desert pretty nice

are you crazy you know growing up when I was young I like those tree, you know, a pretty tree green was what was pretty to me. I mean, we're a family, my dad was a truck driver, a very good one. He's a national truck rodeo

champion, or state champion in California. Truck rodeo is backing up trucks and driving contests. He was a state champion in California and the Mexico and was forcing the nation, I think, when I was like

10th grade, 10th or 11th grade. So he was very good mechanic and very knowledgeable, you know, about everything. I can remember standing in the seat of this Nash in the front seat. I was that little on asking, my dad, how come this car's noisier and that one isn't? And it's, well, this one doesn't have a muffler. He would always take the mufflers off his car and run a straight pipe on him, you know? And just that curiosity, well, how come one car goes faster than the other? And then he explained gear ratios to me.

And then, you know, how can you get, how come some motors can make more horsemen? So I was just, he knew all the answers, and I was full of questions. Well, we had a brief chat about my racing in La Carrera, and you said you had a carburetor off of a La Carrera car. That was a pretty hot deal. Yeah, it was an automobile. A four-barreled cars, a special carburetor. I don't, somehow, my dad came by it from somebody he knew that had ran the race and they had switched that carburetor out for another one or something I remember on Hill.

I thought that was a treasure. I wonder what ever happened to that thing. So that was cool. I thought that was really hot stuff with that carburetor. making that connection, did you have any interactions with Bill Straub, who had built those Lincoln's for the Loc Carreras and then got on to building the Broncos here, became quite a guy in the desert. No, no, I didn't.

I don't know that I ever had a conversation with Bill. What do you think of Parnelli's Bronco going for $1.7 million? Too cheap. I thought so. Yeah. I was surprised. I think a lot of people were expecting it to go closer to $3 million, but, you know, is what it is. Well, Lynn, let's transition.

You built some buggies for the government, as I understand. Yeah, yeah. We built this fast attack vehicles. Well, we started out. We built remote control buggies for target practice. They knew. back then, our next war is going to be in the desert. So they were gearing up for training the pilots to shoot moving targets on the ground.

So we were, you know, pretty heavily into the buggy frame business at the time. And we had a dealer in China Lake. And they started out using old tanks for target practice. and remote control them. But the problem is trying to drive a tank from a mile away to get out of range

was kind of hard to do. I mean, if you'd hit a hole or something, it had spit off a track and then you got six planes in the air at, I don't know how many thousands of dollars an hour, you know, and so the whole operation

is shut down. So they, This dealer of ours gave them a buggy, just a pan buggy, and they put the remote controls on this pan buggy. And used that, and that was quite successful. But because of my connection then, I got a hold of them, I built the frames and all the linkages to make it remote control. And we teamed with a company called Sand Air, which had made remote control boats for the, for the military for target practice. So we'll use all of that stuff and put it into the buggy.

And I think we made, I don't know, I think 30 or so of those remote control target vehicles for them. They only get used once. No, well, they dropped dead bombs out of them. Okay. You know, they were done. They're shooting paintballs. And they were triangulating it somehow and radioing back to. the pilot because they couldn't see by the time they shot they were passed they

couldn't see if they hit or missed half the time you know sure so they were radio and them telling you know training them I had to do this and so I got her foot in the door with with the military and then when they they decided we let's see well how this come first We wound up building 120 regular play cars. They were just a, normally would be a mile steel frame. It was one of our more popular models. But we made it out of Chrome Alley for that purpose.

And we're running into those every once in a while. The end of the park number has a C on it for Chrome Alley. I don't remember the part number for sure, but... And did you armor those up or do anything? No, they were just stuck, just like we would sell them to, you see some pictures down there in the museum of them all in a row. We built them there in Elkhome, we took them across the street at Elkhome Speedway and lapped them in and then shipped them off, you know, 100,000.

you know, 120 of them. They went all over the world to bases everywhere and let them tinker with them. And a few years later they came back with the design, what they wanted. And with the side pods on the side and a third gun on the top, a seat higher over the top, the one you see down there now that we built for the Navy Seals was the vehicle that started the Kuwait war. Did you ever just think about putting machine guns mounted in the back of an old Toyota 4x4? That seems like whatever the rest of the world. That was already on TV. Remember those machine gun? What was that? Desert Rat Patrol. Yeah, exactly. You know, I saw some of those vehicles in the Imperial War Museum in England, those Chevy's that they used in World War II for desert

use. Pretty neat vehicles. You know, a Chevy stripped out Chevy pickups with guns in the back that they basically used as as desert service vehicles. So it was doing you before you were doing you. Hey, so let's transition, Lynn. You've built a beautiful lodge and a museum. What got into you to say, I need to get into the hospitality business and build a museum? I lost my mind.

All right. I mean, you're not cutting corners over there. It's a beautiful spot. Well, it is a great place. my neighbor down there he moved and i bought it from him for 25 grand you believe that i give 26 today yeah cash maybe we call my wife well he was uh he grew marijuana down there and it become illegal in the states and it wasn't down here so he got in a little dispute with his landlord so he

moved back up there and he made me a hell of a deal on it because they didn't want to buy it and I didn't have a clue what I was going to do with it when I bought it. It was just so stinking cheap, you know? I mean that I don't know, he'd been there for 20 some years

and all that rock work and everything. He had a full couple of guys that lived with him that whole time and built all of that. It was unreal. I remember a story This guy lived in a house made out of plywood, you know, two sheets high and a square box, eight by eight by eight, right?

He lived in that thing. Pedro built him a new house in the back. The one that's back there where the gatehouse. Yeah. He built him that. The guy would never move into it. He was a half bubble off level. He wouldn't move into it.

I remember in a psychology course I took about, you know, you can't, you can't, you can take the boy out of the country or you can't take the country out of the boy kind of thing how people would not move it was hard to get people to move you know they talk about the indians and it lived in the tps and stuff like that and uh you have to remind me sometimes i have a tendency to mumble lynn's got a wavering hand on the microphone but you know it keeps running should just zip tie this thing yeah exactly i'll put it on my chest white talk with my hand so my my arms with my the mic goes with them

just keep talking so you're you you pick this thing up you didn't know what you're going to do with it it's stunning it's beautiful you're you're you're really on a run there and I see maybe there's a level of obsession about getting it right I'm projecting that I've been accused of being a perfectionist

although I don't agree because I never get anything perfect but well anyways But you can try, right? It's very first rate. And for Baja, I hate to say it, for Baja that's saying a lot, it's very, very first rate. It's a beautiful spot. I'd love to see the museum.

I know you've got some stuff to do this morning, and I'm heading north, so I don't know if you're going to get a chance to show me a few things. But tell me a little bit about, tell the slow Baja listeners about what they can expect. Even if, I'm going to say it right now, even if you're not crazy in love with off-road racing, the location of this spot is so beautiful on this beautiful beach that you can walk for miles in either direction that has this huge... Or drive, you can just jump out on your buggy and go 50 miles without... Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Interruption, you know? And there's no noise.

No. That's why I live here, you know? That's just peaceful. It looks beautiful. I took a good long walk on the beach at 6, 6.30 this morning, and I saw two people and a dog at, you know, a half... I don't know, a quarter mile away probably. And walk in the beach, there's shells everywhere, there's no trash. It's just really a beautiful spot.

It is. It's quite unique place. So tell me. Laguna percy boo is, well, now they call it Rancho Percy Boo. But there's a little lagoon along the coast right here, which makes it really, well, as you have to go down. I don't know if you've been down there and looked at the lagoon. It's a mile south of us from where we're at right now. you can see the point of it out there.

But it's just a unique place. And that lagoon kind of makes it that more unique, you know. And, of course, the water being here is key, key, key, key. Yeah, absolutely. So it's very green, lots of trees. How many rooms do you have, Lynn? I got 11 ocean-facing rooms right now. We'll be building another seven, three-beds.

places in the back and a little general store and you have a restaurant the restaurant isn't finished right now the museum and the bar is finished the swimming pool is finished we're just

finishing up the restaurant hopefully in the month the restaurant will be done we got all the matter of fact I'll be ordering all the equipment today for it and is Johnny Johnson going to be your bartender You didn't drink up all the profits, man. Oh, he bartends for me often. You know, he's such a great storyteller, you know.

He gets down there and he wind up with a crowd around him, you know, listening to his stories and not doing any drinking. Well, Lynn, I really want to say thanks for the hospitality and thanks for spending a little time on Slow Baja telling me about your history and your life here in Baja. And if people want to find out about your lodge and come stay with you and it's Slow Baja approved,

where can people find you? Chenliff Legacy Lodge on Facebook is how I found you. Yeah, well, either just Lenthenith on Facebook or, but there's a little confusion. There's two lodge websites and one of them got

the person that was running it for me got hacked in and I, That crippled me. I can't manipulate this website. All right. And when is the season here? When are you going to be expecting some guests? I got guests.

No. I mean, I'm not really pushing it or advertising because I don't have a full staff. I'm just getting my feet wet. I mean, it's a lot of work managing 11. It's an all-day job, you know? just people calling them for information and, you know, about Reynolds and stuff, and then you send them all the stuff out. And it's like half of them don't listen.

They call back and you've got to do it two or three times. It's very frustrating for me. So I've turned that over to somebody else to do. Before we wrap up, Jennifer Morton is running a car for you now, driving a car for you now. Yeah, I had a female driver in the family. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Tell me about the car and what she's doing in it. Well, she's going to run the mint with it here coming up.

I had this car in the museum that I bought. It was a sample of a DR1, Desert Racer one, and cars like, you know, Jack Johnson drove. And that was our best, our latest last single-seater. and Rob McCrack and then those guys that drove in that car but this car had no history whatsoever. I bought it from guys that had never raced it and they split up and the car had no history.

So I wanted to give it a little history. I said, you want to take the car and go run it a little bit at least we can give it some history, you know. So that's what we're doing. And she's a great gal and she's helping me out, you know, selling some of my quads and racing stuff. I mean, they're involved. and tours and stuff down here in Mexico.

Yeah, and her husband are good solid folks, Tim and Jennifer Morton. Yeah, really nice people. Baja Bound tours. Yeah. Yeah, so that's, so right now we just pulled it back out. We're putting a new clutch in it and getting some, I'm just loaning under the car, you know. They pay their own expenses, entry fees and all of that. I'm just letting them use the car just so I can, it has some,

identity you know some story to it every other vehicle in the museum's got a story yeah absolutely absolutely hey do you have any advice for folks coming to baha you've been you've been here a long time you've been coming down here quite a while now what would you say to folks who say i don't know anything about baha why am i coming down here well i mean the reason i come down here is for the Solis, I don't go to town. I don't come down here to go to Tijuana or Ensonata. I mean, all those, there's a lot of great places, great food, you know, that you can, you can see. That ain't the reason that I come.

You know, I come down here for the solitude. For appearing on Slow Baja today, our guests will receive the beautiful benchmark map 72-page Baja Road and Recreation Atlas. Do not go to Baja without this, folks. You never know when your GPS is going to crap out, and you're going to. going to want a great map in your lap. Trust me. A lot of you have asked how to support the show. Well, you can go to slowbaha.com, buy yourself some merch, click that donate button, drop a taco in our tank, and always, always share the show with a friend, give it a five-star review on whatever app

you listen to, and I will see you next week.