Slow Baja - The Slow Baja Story

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

In today's Slow Baja conversation, we turned the tables, and my good friend, Wilson Craig, interviewed me about the origins of Slow Baja. I discuss my childhood, becoming a photographer in high school, and attending San Diego State University.  In the Summer of 1984, I made my first trip to Tijuana --to shop for a laundry basket and to drink, of course. Soon, we were venturing down to Puerto Nuevo for lobster and, eventually, to Ensenada for a weekend on the beach. The true origins of Slow Baja were born in my Junior year when we left Spring Break in San Felipe to explore points south.  Enjoy this look behind the curtain of Slow Baja—huge Thanks to Wilson for pushing me to sit down for this conversation.  For more information about Slow Baja: https://www.slowbaja.com/ Get your Baja insurance here:  https://www.bajabound.com/quote/?r=fl9vypdv2t More information on Slow Baja Adventures: https://www.slowbaja.com/adventures

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches and hands down my favorite tequila. You know, I've long said it. Ask your doctor if Baja's right for you. Well, you've got to check out the Adventures tab at slowbaha.com. Slow Baja is from February 23 to March 1st. It's a slow roll from the beautifully rustic

Rancho Labayota to stunning San Ignacio and back up to sunny San Felipe. We're going to have a one full week to explore some of my favorite places and meet some of my favorite people. We're going to have two nights in San Ignacio and everybody's going to get to go whale watching. You know, those gray whales in the San Ignacio Lagoon are noted for their curiosity and friendliness. So be prepared for them to get up close and check you out. And I'm proud to say, I'm going to be doing a little giving back on this trip. My friend Matthew Schnitzer, the founder of Barbers for Baja, you know the great work they do, sending kids to college. Well, he's on board, and we're excited to launch our new project delivering desperately needed baseball gear

to teams and coaches up and down the peninsula. And we will make our first gear donations on the Slow Baja. You know, it's not the longest or the largest or the most miles. It's the slowest and the best miles, and hopefully the most smiles. Okay, for more information, check out the Slow Baja at Slowbaha.com. Don't be afraid to ask questions. questions. You can always reach me through the contact link at slowbaha.com. And remember, the slow Baja is open to four by four vehicles of any age. Got a two-wheel drive that you think you can make it? Well, let's talk. Once again, that's the Slow Baja, February 23rd through March 1st, 2024. Help me keep Baja slow on the Slow Baja. Well, thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja today. My heaping dose of

gratitude goes out to Wilson Craig. You may have heard that name before, Wilson. It's been so helpful to me personally so helpful to the whole slow baha universe he came down and photographed my slow baha vintage expedition he really did a sensational job but he's been my go-to resource for all things technology related he's been really helpful on radios and walkie-talkies and he programmed it told everybody what to get for their radios and programmed all the radios for the slow baha vintage expedition and he's been It's super helpful in just holding my hand to learn this GPS stuff. I mean, I get it. People use it and all that.

I love the old map in my lap, as you well know. But having 12 people following closely behind on these expeditions, I kind of want to make sure I know where I'm going and I get to see where I'm going. And when I forget where I'm going, there's a digital reminder of this is the plot. This is the course. This is what we planned on. So you ought to follow along. So, Wilson, thanks for all that. And also thanks for pushing me to sit down for this interview.

That's right. Today, on Slow Baja, you're going to get to hear from me and all about how I became Slow Baja. So without further ado, it's Michael Emery, also known as Slow Baja, today on Slow Baja. All right. Depends on how excited you're going to be about this thing. Let's get it going. Hey, Wilson, thanks for having me on Slow Baja today. Thanks for coming.

Glad to have you all. You're going to interview me from what I understand. That's right. I'm taking over this podcast. This makes me a little uncomfortable, but I'm delighted to be here, and we go way back to Rancho El Coyote, about 2019 on the Baja X-L. That's right. You were the first person we met on that trip after we woke up, after we pulled in there about midnight. I met you and Ted in the restaurant, such as it was.

I remember. Yeah. What I remember about that was you had said that you'd come over on the road from Mike Sky Ranch, if I'm not mistaken. And then you said, we turned around middle of that stretch and then came on a different road. And I just drove that stretch in the morning on my private guided trip last month in November. And it's one of the gnarliest, honestly, and this will be my... 40th year of trying to I hate to say that in my 40th year

That's one of two super gnarly Drives that I've done and I did them both on the same trip and you've done both of those drives. I think the other one is what they call Fred's tractor trail. Maybe it's that That four by four trail south of Catavina that you took over to Punta Fanal. Oh, yeah on the Slow Baja vintage with my son Rob. Yeah where Rob became Bobby Baja. He did. He earned his stripes that day for sure.

Let's start out with, just because I know you obviously have a ton of listeners for the 135-plus podcasts you've done at this point since May of 2021, which I think is just amazing, and it's just incredible. 2020, I think. Was it May of 2020?

I think it's 2020. So I met you in beginning of 2019. Yeah. I was just starting to figure out, what is slow Baja at that stage. It took me a little while. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it took me a little while,

and then I started the podcast the next year. I think. I don't have such a great, clear memory of all this. It is an amazing, just body of work in that short time. But tell us, you know, for people who don't know, tell us about you and just how you grew up and where and, you know, what your childhood was like a little bit. Yeah, so a suburban kid, I grew up in the suburbs north of San Francisco,

County, and in those days, Marin County had this reputation. It's kind of like a woo-woo place, you know, transcendental meditation, hot tubs. You know, there had been an ABC, I think did a special on like, you know, the hot tubs and peacock feather massages. And so, you know, it had a, it had kind of a granola reputation, not the wealthy enclave it is today. And as a youngster, second grade, my parents had a back-to-nature movement. My dad started reading these Foxfire books and kind of went nuts. And we ended up buying 10 acres and, you know, having a pretty strange for the rest of my classmates. You know, we heated our house with wood.

We had ducks and chickens and boarded horses and had dogs and for a while a sheep and a goat and this and of that. And, you know, I came home from school and, you know, had a chainsaw when I was in sixth grade and was firing up the, you know, the chainsaw and cutting up wood and cutting up down trees and stacking them. splitting them and, you know, doing all this manual labor stuff. So consequently, I couldn't, I couldn't wait to stop doing all that farm labor. When I was 15, I got very, very lucky. My grandparents were world travelers, and my grandfather had a, I think it was his 75th birthday, maybe, and he had a trip to Africa, safari to Africa planned. At the last minute, my grandmother said she wasn't going.

She didn't need to see animals. She didn't want the dirt. Wasn't interested. and my grandfather couldn't get a refund on the trip. So the last minute he invited my mom and dad and my sisters and myself and took our family, and I became the trip photographer. And so I had an interest in photography. I'd gotten a 35 millimeter camera a couple years before, and I was taking it pretty seriously.

But all of a sudden, I had this opportunity to go to Africa, and I was going to go photograph, you know, animals. And so, you know, I always loved National Geographic. We had a cabinet full of National Geographic in the house. And so I was thinking immediately, like, that's the caliber of work that I wanted to produce from my family trip. And we had a great camera store in the town that I grew up in. So, you know, they were helping me out and educating me and training me. And I bought a Zoom lens. And then for the trip, I also bought a big telephoto lens.

And coming back from the trip, getting all the, well, let me back up, going to Africa, not alone. I'd been to Lake Tahoe or I'd been to the Reno side or the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe once probably. And I'd been to Ohio to visit my other grandparents. So I hadn't done any travel, so to speak, at all, you know, one trip to L.A., but my parents really didn't travel. And here I am in Africa. And from the slums of Nairobi where you see, you know, diesel trucks just belching black smoke. and the people really living in very, very different circumstances than where I was growing up in Marin County.

And then you get out on the belt. You see the Masamara and you see these animals. You see lions on the kill. And it was just such a mind exploding experience for me, seeing it all firsthand, digesting it all, trying very seriously to make pictures of it all. And then the process of getting the film developed on the other end.

And I shot all slide film. So, you know, there's a real process of getting it right and then finding the right images and getting those enlarged and then creating photo albums and all of that stuff. So all that time at the camera store landed me a job. They offered me a job on my 16th birthday, which was their minimum age for employment. So, you know, the day after my 16th birthday, I started at the camera store. And it was just an amazing experience. Again, I was a youngest guy there.

And, you know, I'm trying to learn. And there's just an opportunity. They had a rental department, so I could rent 300 millimeter F2-8s and go be like a professional auto racing photographer, which I, you know, all of a sudden was doing and got to work at a very young age for my local newspaper and for the PR director at Sears Point Raceway used to get his film developed at the shop. So I got to meet him. And, you know, he offered me a job very quickly. Steve Miller was in a lot. He never offered me a job. But Rick Lawler, who was the PR director at Sears Point at 16 years old. I had a car. I had gear and he obviously didn't want to

photograph his own races. So he was keen to have me out and showed me the ropes. And it was awesome. It really was awesome. And it allowed me to at a very early age understand he didn't care how old I was. He needed me to produce results. And that was a huge responsibility that I really rose to that occasion. And so whether it was, you know, working for the local newspaper, um, photographing high school sports or the, the auto races on the weekends or whatever, you know, I was doing it. I was a professional. And so when I went off to college, that's what I want to do. I want to be a newspaper photographer and ended up at a school at San Diego State. They had a 20,000 circulation daily newspaper with no, um, faculty advising. It was all students and it was super competitive. You know,

they, they hired six of us to let us shoot it out for a month to see who would get the one. staff position. They had a staff of, I think, six photographers, and they hired six more to have a cutthroat process, you know, to see who was going to get that seventh staff position. And I got it as an 18-year-old freshman, and that was like never looking back. I was just on my way, shooting, you know, as a professional, so to speak, a college kid, but a professional. Right. And so the work you were doing at Sears Point, which is now Sonoma Raceway, was that your first exposure to motorsports and automotive

things? Yeah, I had an affinity for that stuff. Again, sort of the two things in my family that we had a lot of books, but my dad had 20-year collections of National Geographic all in, you know,

numerical order. And on the other side of the cabinet, it was the same thing of his road and track magazine collection. He loved cars, and for whatever reason, hadn't had a, you know, a fast car since 1956. He had a 56 Chevy and he never had another fast car. Almost bought a Porsche when he moved to California in 61, didn't regretted it forever, but was up to speed on every, every nuance, every design thing from cars from the 30s on. And so I grew up

with, you know, reading these old magazines. And when I was going to buy my first car as a 15-year-old, you know, naturally I referred to the family inside. of magazines and read all these road test reports for, you know, cars that were now 10 or 12 or however many years old that I was looking for. And that's how I was able to deform my decision. You know, I had all the knowledge. And so, you know, I love, I had an affinity for motorsports. The camera store that I worked at, I think there were five Porsches, a BMW 2002, a 65 Mustang fastback. I mean, every guy who worked there seemed to be a car net. And so I fell right in. with that gang, again, being the youngest and always having, you know, a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, you know, with the guy who had to load a salon or what have you. I mean, to think about it now, those experiences are crazy, how much we all loved. One of my jobs was vacuuming the store every Saturday morning, you know, before we opened. And I took the Eureka upright vacuum and painted it to look like a Porsche 956.

And then I put a video camera on the, you know, fixed a video camera to the vacuum cleaner and made a video of me vacuuming the store set to the soundtrack of the movie LaMaw. So good times. Well, you can't drive a portion to go back to nature. That wouldn't have been keeping up with the Joneses. No. People would look down on that. So you were a photographer in high school.

You got into that in high school. What did you do with photography in college? So, you know, landed this job, and again, the super competitive process to get a job at my college daily, became the only freshman on the staff, and worked my tail off to become, you know, one of the best photographers. I worked up to photo editor and won a couple of intercollegiate California Press Association Awards. So they had kind of a big competition of all the college newspapers. We'd all get together for a big competition every year. year and and I didn't get a chance to enter that as a young underclassman but I think my third year I actually got the invite to go to that and I won the the news photography competition there and

another picture a photograph that I had made that year won the overall you know like the I called it the Pulitzer of college newspaper photography so you know I thought that was going to set me up and you know, that I was going to get all sorts of work from that, but no, nobody cares. So, but what it did do is it made me want to pursue photography and the distractions of a big college, San Diego State. I really had trouble saying no to all the fun stuff that I was doing, the Baja trips, the fraternity stuff. I had a group of friends who were bartenders, and I was just burning the candle at both ends, and I'd done it for three plus years. And then at 21 ended up, instead of going to my finals, I ended up going to the hospital with a stress-induced heart condition,

and the doctor said, hey, your heart's fine. You just got to figure out how to moderate your head and try and do less and do it better. And that was also sort of like a big wake-up call for me. Like, you know, you just can't do it all. And so I ended up getting a scholarship because of this prize I won. I got a scholarship to go to art school in San Francisco. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to make a big break, get away from all these other distractions. You know, I'd been nominated to be the president of my fraternity. And again, I was 21, so I had, you know, bartender friends everywhere. I could go out drinking for free every night.

So it seemed easier to me to make a change, a clean break, other than, rather than moderating my desire to be, you know, the next hire at the LA Times. Or, you know, I just couldn't figure out how to say no to these things that were pulling me in three, clearly, four, if you count Baja, four separate directions. And so I went to art school in San Francisco, and that was a very good experience educationally. And I realized everything that I'd been doing at SDSU, the journalism, I got exposed to documentary photography. And so we saw the picture.

I saw the picture right behind me here of W. Eugene Smith, the country doctor, an incredible photograph from the 1950s. And I had an instructor who had just won the Pulitzer Prize, and he became a mentor to me, Kim Komenich, and exposed me to deeply meaningful, thoughtful, black and white traditional documentary photographer, photography. And that's, that became my obsession. That's what I, you know, started studying. So all the, all the ego-driven stuff of, you know, who I was shooting for, where the pictures were getting published, how much money I was making off the sale of photography, all that went out the window. and all of a sudden all I cared about was what story was I telling and how how was I going to be remembered or not really how was I going to be remembered how are these photographs going to stand the test of time? So it totally changed my outlook and got rid of the Nikons with the motor drives, bought old Likas and just kind of simplified it and tried to just,

and slow it down. So going back to San Diego State. So you went to college, San Diego, young men and border towns, right? How did you, so I imagine, I don't know if you ever spent any time in Baja before you went to college, but you're in college right across the border from Ensonata, Tijuana. How did you get exposed? Yeah, and that's just funny now, having pushed three kids through college myself, how feral we were as college. kids. My dad dropped me off with a U-Haul and some used, you know, furniture that we had collected

from, you know, various places. I didn't get a dorm room, so I had to furnish a little one-bedroom apart with my roommate. And the stuff that we needed that we didn't have, that kids today, their mommies would take them shopping to Target or to bedbath and beyond or whatever and have a big shopping day to outfit your place. And my dad was gone. I looked at my room and said, hey, we need a laundry basket. And one of the guys, you know, older upperclassmen hanging out at the pool drinking beer at our apartment complex said, dude,

you got to go down to Tijuana. Buy that stuff on the street. Okay. So we drove down to Tijuana, only a half hour away, parked on the U.S. side of the border, walked across, and, you know, very quickly you get distracted with, hey, you can go into the long bar and have a tequila shot.

And, you know, you might have five tequila shots and six beers. And then you're starting to, you know, negotiate for a rattan basket for your laundry. And you kind of forgot what the heck else you're supposed to do while you're down there. And there were a lot of trips like that. And, you know, we were good little boys. Our first spring break, we came back home.

I went to college with the guy that I went to high school with. We were roommates. So we drove home for spring break and did that. And he got to go to, you know, Easter Mass and all the stuff. that was important to his mom. And on the drive back, I said, I'm never doing that again. We're going to Baja next year for spring break like everybody else. And we did.

And we had a great time. And fast forwarding from that to get to, I guess, probably the origin of, you know, my desire for Baja exploration and what led to maybe the beginning of Slow Baja is that third spring break trip. Again, it's 100-something degrees at 6 a.m. in San Felipe. So you're up early. And you've done this. And this is my third time.

Yeah, this is my third time. Sleeping on the beach and you're drinking 1,000 facades. Exactly. Those days it was mainly coronas, I believe, or Victorias. And we were drinking them. They came 20 to a case in those days. And the beer was three bucks. and the bottle deposit was $4.

So it was $7 a case, but you got $4 back. We're probably drinking 50 beers a day, something like that. You know, it's just hot. You're drinking all day. You don't have anything else going on. Then you go to the bars and you drink more at night. And it just kind of started to ring hollow. And my buddy, Ted, a few years older, four years older than me,

he always, he was Latin studies major. and he always had this wanderlust. You know, he was always going to jump on the train and go to Guatemala or do these things. And so I don't know, whatever, second day, third day, we're starting to really seriously form this plan of like, screw this. We're just going to get in my car and start driving south until we run out of money. And we did. Yeah. With no planning at all.

And no, you've never been south of. No. We'd never been south of the south end of the street. I don't know if we'd ever. been south of like El Nito. So you had Miramar at one end. Yeah. And two blocks or three blocks south was the furthest south we'd ever been. So I had the AAA map in the glove box and we got it and open it up and, you know, just started driving. And go ahead. I don't really remember a whole bunch of the, how, how long it took us to get from San Felipe to El Rosario. But we got into El Rosario

pretty late at night and ended up sleeping in a gazebo there. And there's a lot of jake breaking of the diesel trucks going through. And I guess Pee Wee's, you know, big adventure had just come out. And we were kind of making jokes that Large March was coming after us and all that. And I don't know if we actually ever slept, but the cops came around 2 o'clock in the morning, you know, and figured out that we were just dumb college kids and they let us stay. and we got up with first light and started driving south. And, I mean, the sort of memorable part of the trip,

the most memorable part of the trip, well, anyways, we got to Guerrero Negro and slept in the parking lot. Well, we, first of all, the reason we slept in the parking lot, we got it, we got there, and we thought, well, we'll just go in and use the bathroom. And there's one guy sitting at the bar. and the one guy looked like he'd had a few drinks, you know, guy, old guy, as we said in those days, an old guy, we were in our 20s, so he was probably in his late 50s, early 60s, mid-60s, maybe,

I don't know, 68, who knows, but he had a shirt unbuttoned, and he was really sunburned, and he said, come on in, boys, I'll buy you a drink. So that was all it took for us in those days, you know, hell yeah. So we went in and introduced ourselves and he said, my name's Bud Dame. Ask me again, I'll tell you the same. And through, I know, three, four rounds of drinks and some nachos and all that, it turns out Bud was the king of hollow cord doors in Boise, Idaho,

and he was heading to Cabo and he liked to drive straight, although he seemed to like to spend a lot of time at the bar when we met him. But he drove straight through, who knows what he was taking. to Cabo where he had a boat to get rid of with his third wife and a condo to get rid of with his fifth wife or a boat to get rid of with his fifth wife and a condo to get rid of with his third wife. I don't know. But he said, let me give you some advice, boys. If it flies, floats or f***ks, rent it, don't buy it. But the parting shot was, you know, we'd spent a couple hours with this guy, four or five, who knows.

I mean, we ended up going to sleep and right on the dirt. in the parking lot after that. That's how intoxicated we were. Bud looked at me and he says, you know, you're going to be all right. And he looked at Eric and he said, you're going to need some help. And he looks at Ted.

And Ted was tall and handsome. He could have been Brad Pitt stunt double in those days. Had girls just falling off him all the time. He was a bartender down Pacific Beach. And Bud looked at Ted and he said, you you remind me a lot of me let me let me tell you something I don't have anybody I want to give my business to

my kids they don't want it you go to work for me right now I'll start you at 18,000 a year now you live in San Diego so that's like you making $36,000 a year you making $36,000 a year right now Ted was probably making $8,000 so it's like a huge bump for him he's like no no no well you come to work for me and you know and gave him the Tard told them all the stuff.

Obviously, Ted never did it. And we just, we just looked this company up. Yeah. 3,000 employees, 815 million. Yeah. Wood green industries, Bud Dave. Bud was a smart dude. Yeah, yeah.

Bud was a smart dude for everything except women, I guess. He had some vices. But that trip was just those sort of experiences. You know, we had so little money that we were open to. the kindness of strangers. Right. And Baja provided. You know, we were down in Mulehay after that, and a guy says,

oh, kids, come, you know, stay in front of my house. You can sleep in my, basically we slept in his carport. Right. You know, and just, you know, going down, when we finally ran out of money, we were down at Sanis Pack, and we had to pick up beer bottles, get enough, you know, bottles to get the deposit. And to think how meager we were that we could have gotten back

on whatever it was, two boxes of bottles, so eight bucks, you know, that would have been enough to, run us in our Toyota all the way back to the border. But we were meager in those days, and it was such an adventure. It was such an adventure that it just ate at me for years after that, like, how can we do more of that? And what was, at that point, like, what was the overall feeling and just kind of vibe about Baja then, like among middle America?

If you had told your parents, we're going to take off and just drive down the Baja Peninsula for a week, what would they have said, whether justified or unjustified, right? Well, my roommate's parents were absolutely petrified. Absolutely petrified. Again, we didn't have cell phones. They had no way to reach us. They couldn't track us. We were just gone.

They didn't know, and they had to just not know. And it freaked them out. My parents were, you know, I don't know. I mean, my dad had read a lot of books about fishing in Baja, and so he had a romantic ideal, you know, is it Ray Conraddy who, you know, flew all over and fished all over Baja in the 50s and 60s. So he had a romantic notion of it and he thought I was really doing something. And again, he came from a very humble upbringing.

His dad was a coal miner and my dad put himself through college working in a factory and got into engineering and just worked, work, work, work, work. He didn't have that ability or that gene that just says, I'm going to go bum around until I run out of money. That was totally foreign to him. So that I think that I was doing it, maybe the, There was some, you know, I don't know, pride from his stat. And my mom, I'm sure, just couldn't, like, actually compute, like, where Baja was or the hazards or whatever. She was like, La, La, la, didn't, you know, like, Baja, okay, enjoy yourself, honey. Yeah.

Call me when you're home. So. And, you know, it's still kind of like that, though, when you tell people, like, when I told people, 2019 was my first time to ever cross the border into Baja. And, you know, we found that race, you know, as you did. And, you know, just telling my family and friends and, you know, people were going to go do this thing, they were like, oh, my God, really? No, you can't do that. It's dangerous down.

People get killed down there, you know, and it's like people get killed everywhere, and they actually get killed a lot less in Baja. But there is kind of a set of beliefs about it that I think until you've been down there, you know, unless you know somebody that's been down there and can really kind of read you in on it. There's fear and misunderstanding. And ignorance. And I think maybe ignorance in the kindest sense of the word that people just don't know. And, you know, getting back to my latest podcast on the 50th anniversary of the Trans-Peninsula Highway, to think in 1973, there wasn't even a paved road that went the entire length. Right.

There wasn't a paved road that went the entire length of the Baja Peninsula. So to drive there, to explore there, it was quite an adventure. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I don't know what to make of all that, but there's some lore. And I guess for me now, there's a burning desire to get down those dirt roads while they're still dirt roads. Right. You know, before all these dang van lifers. Right.

Ruin Baja for all of us. I'm only kidding Van Lifers. Josiah, that's a shout out to you, brother. So tell me about it. So before Baja, let's go back a little bit further. So before 2019, you had some other experiences in motorsports in Mexico. Yeah, the marriage wrecking, the marriage wrecking years. Here at SLOBA, we can't wait to drive our old land cruiser south of the border.

And when we go, we'll be going with Baja Bound Insurance. Their website's fast and easy to use. Check them out at BajaBound.com. That's BajaBound.com, serving Mexico traveler since 1994. So my grandfather, the world traveler that I'd referenced earlier, I'd had the great fortune of in between my junior and senior year of high school, my cousin who had just graduated from high school, my grandfather wanted to send him to Europe. And he had sent my mom and my aunt and uncle to Europe when they had graduated from high school in the 50s. So my grandfather calls the travel guide who had sent my mother, aunt and uncle to Europe when they graduated, you know, 30 years prior to this. And this tour guide said, oh, yeah, I've got a great trip going out of Pallas Verde's high school in Los Angeles.

So my cousin says, I don't want to go to high school. I don't want to go to Europe with a bunch of high school kids. I don't know. You know, I want to go with my classmates. But my grandfather thought that was a crummy trip, so he didn't want to send him with his classmates. He wanted to send him with his old friend Harry, who did the best high school graduation trips in the country,

according to Gramps. So to assuage my cousin's nervousness, my grandfather sent me along as a sidekick. So we went with a bunch of kids we didn't know, and we went on this great trip where we saw everything in Europe. So fast forward, I'm graduating from high school the next year. I'm not going back to Europe. I'd just done an amazing trip.

So my grandfather said, what do you want to do for your high school graduation? So I want to go to the Bonnerant School and become a race car driver. You know, that was just ridiculous. But he was a good sport, and he sent me to the Bonarant School for a three-day high-performance driving course. It was at Sears Point Raceway. And it made me realize, like, okay, I had some desire, but to get to the level of being a race car driver, I was really going to have to work at it.

And that was going to be going to be. require money that I didn't have and a level of commitment that I probably didn't have and, you know, a level of discipline that I didn't have and I went to San Diego State and all of a sudden I was distracted with a thousand other things. But this desire of motorsport did, it was deeply seated. Maybe it's those old road and tracks or whatever, but it was in there. Fast forward to 22 years later and I'm turning 40. And I'd had a nice run employment-wise. I'd done a book in 1994, had international exhibitions, marriage mortgage minivan came right after that. All of a sudden, I've got three kids under three. And I was the governor of California's photographer for four

out of his five years, Gray Davis, who got recalled. And out of the blue, my wife had a, I was out of work. and my wife had a job offer for one of her former bosses. She was employed, but had a job offer that was too good to pass up. We had to move to Boston. I said, geez, well, if we don't have to sell our San Francisco place, let's go to Boston, let's try it. Like, you know, again, I was a little down on California at that time. My gravy train, my retirement job of being the governor of California's photographer

and becoming the chief photographer for the state of California, which was right around the corner for me, that just all evaporated. So all of a sudden, you know, we move cross-country and I'm living in the suburbs for the first time of my life. And my wife said, I just really need you to, like, stay home with the kids. Like, I'm traveling all over the world, opening these offices in India and Hong Kong and here and there. And I just really need to not have to worry about scheduling, you know, a nanny or a babysitter or this and that. Just stay home with the kids.

So that was kind of an adjustment would be putting. it politely. You know, I'm, I'm in suburbia, I'm in a place where I don't know anybody. My phone's not ringing, you know, I'm not the governor of California's photographer at the drop of the hat, you know, photographing world leaders here and there.

I'm driving my kids to school and or taking them to the bus and taking them to Little League and, you know, doing these things, going on field trips with second graders and kindergartners. And as I was rolling up on 40, we lived in a fairly affluent town and people were

throwing in our age group we had a lot of people who were turning 40 and some who were turning 50 and there are some pretty amazing parties that people were throwing and as I was looking at that I said you know honey there's this thing that I really want to do and this had stemmed from I'm going to get probably pretty teary-eyed here but in college when I was an 18-year-old freshman I met a guy who lived on the couch of one of our friends at the other end of the pool. We lived at one end of the pool and had some friends from home who were three or four years older than us who lived at the other end of the pool. And the first summer we were there, there was a guy living on the couch named Rolf. And Rolf was hilarious.

Rolf had been in college for seven years at this point. And there was no graduation on the horizon for Rolf. He taught us to surf. he tried to teach us how to pick up girls. It was comical. Looking back on the comical stuff that Rolf tried to teach us, you know, youngsters, us whippersnappers, is ridiculous. But sadly, Rolf was now dying of brain cancer. And we, my college buddies, we all got together to sort of have a moment.

We'd run in a house out in the desert in California. We had a moment where we sort of all had this reckoning like, Jesus. You know, we're all kind of. coming up on 40 or some of us are a little over 40. And Rolf's 45 and he's, you know, he's got a couple months to live. And so at 2 o'clock in the morning or whatever, after, you know, several drinks, we got onto what's on our bucket list. And the La Carrera Pan Americana road race in Mexico, which goes from Chiapas to border to border in those days,

it was 2,000 miles over six days, high speed, very dangerous vintage car rally. I said, I'd seen this thing when I was in, as a college student, it first was rekindled in Baja in the late 80s, and then it moved to mainland Mexico, where it was a recreation of a race that happened in the 1950s from 1950 to 1954. You nerds in the crowd will know that the Porsche Carrera was named after this race. The Hoyer Carrera, which I'm wearing right now, was named after this race. So it was a very famous race in its day. and the rally that came out of it, the high-speed vintage rally that came out of it in the early 90s was really something.

The guys from Pink Floyd had done the race in the middle 90s and done a film about it that had achieved cult status and had written a soundtrack to the race and all that is a pretty amazing thing. So here I am, you know, with my college buddies,

lamenting poor Rolf's demise and I say two something in the morning, yep, the La Carrera Pan Americana is my bucket list. And my buddy John Weinstein, Wino, said, well, if you want to do that, I'll give you my old Dotson Roadster. And I'm like, wow, now he's kind of like called my bluff. So the wheel starts turning. And, you know, I sign up for the La Carrera Pan Americana. Managed to get a sponsor.

Didn't get Wino's Dotson Roadster because he was in Wisconsin. At the time his roadster was two years too new for the race. so I ended up buying a slightly older Dotson Roadster, but it planted the seed, got the wheels turning, and all of a sudden I'm having a car built, a race car built on the cheap in California. I'm living in Massachusetts. And before you know it,

Ted and I are, you know, driving a race car. Neither one of us know anything. I don't even know. I'd never even towed a car before, and here I am towing it from San Francisco to Chiapas. I mean, we just, the adventures were off the hook. The stupidity was off the hook. We were in way, way over our heads for sure.

Had no business doing this at all. Finished dead last. Beat 19 cars that blew up or crashed. Had the time of my life. And I was a full addict. Full addict. So fast forward, that was 2006. 2008.

Can't do in 2007 because, you know, the wounds are still too fresh for my marriage. 2008, the first year, 2006. I had a energy drink sponsor. Ted and I were drinking five of these 16-ounce howling monkey energy drinks, and we're screaming each other the whole time. We're laughing, but we're so jacked up that we're, like, fighting with each other. We can't stop talking, all that. Finally, at the end of the race, I said to Ted, if we ever do this again,

we need a tequila sponsor. So fast forward two years later, I'm getting ready to do the race again. Now, Ted's not able to do it. He's gotten married and he's got a second child on the way, And he can't do it. So to feed my addiction, I provided my car as an arrive and drive, which meant I got, you know, a check from a buddy of mine who was turning 60. And I towed the car all the way down to Chiapas. He flew in and I met him.

Maybe I met him in Mexico City or something. And we drove down. But basically, I moved to the navigator's seat. He got to do the glory job of driving. But we did land that tequila sponsor. And that was right here, tequila Fortaleza. Yeah. And it was a pretty new brand.

They had some trademark issues. There was a rum brand that was, in those days, it was called Los Obuelos. It wasn't Fortaleza. They had a trademark issue. And I convinced Guillermo Salsa to sponsor me for the entry fee and to provide some tequila for me that I was going to pour his wonderful tequila for me for. for and tell his story to all these racers. And he went for it. And surprisingly, for folks now that we're talking about 20, 23, where you can't find

Fortaleza anywhere, he gave me 10 cases, 60 bottles of Fortaleza for six days. I mean, we were there 10 days total, but. And all I had to do was pour this stuff. So we poured it and drank it and poured it and drank it and drank it and drank it and ported and drank it. And I think I was sobering up every morning as I was putting on that five-point harness. But we did have the time of our lives. And to have a, I mean, little did I know how amazing that tequila was and how amazing that experience was. But I'll just be honest with you, it was full addiction at this stage. So I look, you know. To Mexico on

driving, not to the fortale. No, well, kind of. That's where I stopped drinking everything. and just got on to tequila. But to the La Carrera Pan Americana. So, you know, halfway through the year, I would just start like this. Okay, I got to start fundraising. I got to get this sponsor going. Right. And again, you know, it seemed to be on a two-year cycle now.

So I'd have one year to patch up the relationship. Right. And then on to the next year. And so 2006, I did it with Howling Monkey. 2008. I had this amazing experience. And we had the car totally dialed in. We had zero maintenance.

We drove with a foot flat on the gas the entire day, seven days of the race, didn't do a single thing maintenance-wise, poured tequila every night. In a field of 108 cars, we ran as high as 57th with 100 horsepower. I mean, really punched way, way, way above our weight. My driver was quite a good guy. He raced, he did track days with a Porsche. So he knew how to drive. And my car was a car with training wheels.

so he drove the heck out of it. And again, as soon as we got out of the car every day, I'm just pouring, pouring, pouring. So we had such a fun, fun time. 2010, I come back, full addict, and the U.S. director of the race connected me with a racer who had had some problems finishing in prior events, and he said, basically, you're a specialist in last place finishes.

So get this guy across the finish line. just wants to finish. And I hadn't looked too deeply into the reasons he hadn't finished prior. I was an addict. I had a free trip to Mexico. All I had to do was get myself down there and everything else was covered. Yeah. Hotels, food, the whole thing.

So I was in, you know? And, well, I didn't realize at the time, but I was going to be the navigator. And to some extent, without putting too fine a point on it, I was the one, eyed man in the land of the blind. I was also a driving instructor. And that was exciting. And by day five, my

driver had really, really gotten much, much, much better. In fact, he had improved dramatically and his confidence had grown dramatically. And we were really kind of cooking for 53 Lincoln. We were really like driving

it a lot harder. and a lot more aggressively. And I think by this point, half of the cars in our class had dropped out. So we were angling for a third place finish, which was pretty important to my guy to walk out of there with the trophy. And he got in over his head on a turn

and lifted and hit the brakes. And all of a sudden, we were skidding backwards down this road for 100 yards and came to a pretty heavy, you know, not a crash, but we got stopped by a bowl. that kept us from going off of a hillside, a cliff, and down, you know, 100 meters into a ravine with a creek, which I had had a pretty good view of when I was skidding backwards all that time.

I really thought, wow, this is really not going to end well. You're glad to hear that rock hit the metal. Yeah. Yeah. And so we managed to, you know, we were very close to the back of the race and not to make too much time out of this. But as soon as the racers all go every 30 seconds fastest to slowest, they open the road and regular traffic comes through. And before you know it, a big rig truck came through a toe strap on us

and pulled us off of this rock. And we limped, we had a bent axle and some other stuff, but we limped and limped and got it to wherever the stage finished. And our team was there and we got on to repairing. And we were in the race with no visible damage. And had you not seen us, you know, with our ass off. the end of a hillside off of this cliff, you would have never known that something untoward had happened.

Unfortunately, there was a photographer who was right there when the road opened and saw this recovery effort and made some photos of it and had it on Facebook before you know it, unpronounced to me, and my wife had already seen it. So when I called home that night, or she called me, I should say, she called me, and I just played it off. Like, you know, nothing had happened. Everything was great. And she really wanted me to understand quite clearly that I was married.

I had three young children at home who wanted to have a father and grow up with a father and to go sailing off of a cliff. And I guess the caption was fairly sensational. The Boulder had kept them from sailing off the cliff, whatever. So I couldn't argue. You know, I'd had this run, but I also had this full addiction. It was a life-changing adrenaline-fused week of my life that I didn't want to give up. And I'm, you know, hanging out with all these international races.

Retired Formula One guys and, you know, retired rally champions. And it was just such an amazing adventure. And I had Fortaleza tequila that was back with me. So I had it all worked out. You know, I had the sponsors. I had the ability. I knew what I was doing. I had friends.

Anyways, long story short, I did it the next year as a photographer. And then that was that. I had to make a clean break, and I sold my race car a couple years later. And in a moment of immaturity, you know, we were going to use the money. Amy wanted to use the money to redo our backyard. In a moment of immaturity, I said, I got to buy a car today. Like, what's on Craigslist right now? Like, I just sold this little Dotson race car, and I've got to do something, something that fits the family,

something that I can't, you know, that I can justify. Let me put it that way, something that I can justify. family friendly, and I found this really clean, old Land Cruiser FJ40 and bought it. And it just happened to be February 14th, which was convenient to give my wife a Valentine's Day present when she came home from work. Of your new rig. Hey, look what I got you. Look what I got you, baby. Yeah.

Yeah. So, and then, you know, fast forward. That was 2012. Ted was turning 50 that June. and all of a sudden I started angling for a Baja trip, and that, that's all, that's the addiction now. You know, it's become this force inside me that I'm, I've got a, like in basketball, I've got the shot clock going in my mind all the time.

When's my next Baja trip? When's my next Baja trip? Yeah. Yeah. No, I get it. Yeah, I've been like that ever since 2019, and I think I've been down there seven times since. Well, I'm truly amazed because I didn't peg you as a Baja file the moment that I met you there at El Coyote.

But hell, you've really taken to the place. I think it's, you know, and I, you know, you hear from, and I know other people that were on that trip that are the same way. I mean, some people obviously did it and never went back and probably never go back. But, you know, I just felt the same way you did, which is this is just really something special and unusual. one I think, you know, I'm sure there are similar experiences available elsewhere in the world, but not within a nine-hour drive from here, you know. It is just that it's the people and the places and, you know, all of the things and just being able to drive on dirt roads for two days once. I drove by myself, headed down to Cabo, and just never saw anybody, you know.

2012, you and Ted went down for his birthday. How far did you go? What did you do? on that trip? We got as far south as Loretto. Okay. Yeah, so it was a pretty good trip. Two vehicles, five guys. First trip for the FJ40

took the hard top off and had the soft doors, put the soft doors in the bikini top on. And other than that, it was almost entirely stock. It was, I'd changed the gear set so it'd go down the highway a little easier. but it was just an old tractor, you know, and it was so, so, um, had two jerry cans there. So I was trying to figure out how many dirt miles I could get, what kind of mileage I was getting.

We were looking at the Baja almanac there trying to figure out, you know, plot these dirt roads and those dirt roads. So it was just the first time, I've been to Baja plenty. Mm-hmm. But it was the first time that I'd really driven dirt roads for hours on end. Mm-hmm. Just hours. Yeah. You know, like you're going out.

You don't see anybody. there and you're just going and going and going and going. And that was mind change, you know, mind altering. And, I mean, that trip was really amazing. And I'll just, you know, leap from there to, you know, kind of make some time here. Just leap from there to 2019. I'd just come off of a rocket to the moon experience working for bring a trailer. I was, I think, early, we'll just say early employee.

No need to put too fine a point on the whole. thing as early and bring a trailer, only half dozen people in the office. And it was just a rocket ship. And for me, 80-something hours a week, month after month after month. And when I stepped off of that, the first thing that I did was the 2019 Baja XL. And so to just make this change, you know, change the channel and all of a sudden find myself with a hundred-something other like-minded ralliers from 25 or 30. countries, I had this anxiety, you know, about what I was doing that I didn't, you know,

I had driven a little bit of dirt, but I was no rally driver. And so this, again, this anxiety, I'd been to dirtfish rally school. I'd been to the Bonneran school. I'd driven the, you know, the La Carrera Pan Americanas. I had done this off-roading for Ted's birthday, but I still, you know, didn't think of myself as a guy who was going to, you know, do the Rubicon or climb, you know, or do these, you know, off-road stages in Baja at speed. Right.

And I had this moment where I had a little vision, and I said, I want to paint slow Baja on the soft doors of my truck. And I was telling the guy who ran this hot rod shop in Petaluma, who did in this beautiful old, old-school twine wrapping of my steering wheel, I was telling you about this vision that I had. And he said, oh, you know, T.J. in the shop next door, he was a bicycle guy. He, you know, built custom bicycles. He said, TJ, he does sign painting in his spare time.

You ought to have him do it. So, like, he called my bluff. And all of a sudden, I'm talking to T.J. And I'm driving back to San Francisco with no doors on my truck. And he says, come back on Monday and I'll have your doors painted. No direction at all. Like, you know, didn't say this size, that font, whatever. Like, came back on Monday.

And she's huge letters across both doors like, slow Baja. And I said, well, I guess I'm slow Baja now. It was interesting. That was the first thing we saw, obviously, when we saw the FJ before we saw you guys inside the restaurant there, and Rancho O'Coyote. And I looked at that and it said, slow, bah, and it was clearly, though, a brand. You know, there was something that was going to happen with this that wasn't, it wasn't a direction. It wasn't a... What was going to happen? Who knows? I couldn't tell what it was, but I could tell it was something, you know? Yeah, I couldn't tell what it was either. Yeah, I mean, that was before you had the cactus and the tire and the sticks. Which came out of that trip, you know, that came out of that trip.

And you talk about guys who've never been back to Baja, the guys that we really ended up running with sort of towards the latter half of the trip, you kind of find your own weight. You find the vehicles that are moving at the same speed you're moving at and whatever. And we found these guys driving this mid-80s blazer that just had this great patina and faded old strife. and they were, you know, hipster. I mean, everybody had a nickname. We didn't know anybody's names. We're, you know, whatever. We're assigning nicknames and stereotypes to folks,

and these five guys had beards and longish hair, and we're super cool guys. And later found out how talented each individual in that vehicle was, and they're all superstars in their fields. But we were just referring to them as the Almond brothers, you know? And we kept running into the Alman brothers here and there. And one day we were in Pescadero, and we were waiting for a taco stand to open.

and, you know, we went in. I decided the last second to bring in a bottle of Fortaleza. We were spending the night there that night anyway, so we didn't have anywhere to go and started sipping Fortaleza. And I think we solved all the problems in the world between the six of us. And we got on to really liking these guys. And I was looking at Phil. Phil Ticelli had this sketchbook.

And I'm looking through his sketchbook, and I see this drawing of this cactus with this tire over. And I'm like, dude, this is slow Baja right here. This is, this is my, this is my logo. This is my future. And so I said, hey, Phil, will you send me a scan of this thing? And he did. Huh.

And then I said, hey, Phil, can you vectorize? And he did. And so that, I mean, so all of a sudden I had like this thing that was so authentic that Phil had seen in person. Yeah. I didn't see that particular cactus, but Phil had seen in person. And I'd seen other cactuses with the tire over the arm. and so slow Baja.

And so there it was. You know, like I had the name on the side of the car and I had a logo and I didn't know what I was doing with it. But I was searching for more information on Baja. I was trying to figure out what my next thing was after bring a trailer. And I found a podcast on Baja. And I was listening to it. It was primarily on off-road racing. and I heard an interview with Bruce Meyer

who's the head of the, you know, created the Myers-Manks Dune Buggy. And I really enjoyed it. And it really resonated with me. And Bruce, you know, had gone through an awful lot of stuff that I didn't know a thing about. And I felt like I got a real education on a man who had changed the world

but was bitter about it. You know, he had had this moment where he changed everything, created this amazing thing, this iconic vehicle. but he didn't, you know, he didn't get to trademark and he didn't make all the money off of it that he thought he should. And it took him 20-something years before he had this revelation of, you know, he created an awful lot of happiness for people. And he was bitter about it for a long time.

Well, bring a trailer, I'd create an awful happiness for people too. And, you know, I was a little bitter about things there. And it just was an epiphany like, hey, man, move on. And I sent this podcast or a note and said, hey, I just really enjoyed the thing. And within an hour, I was booked to be a guest on his show. And he was in L.A.

And my wife was working in L.A. Monday through Friday. So I said, I'll be a guest on your show if I can do it in person because I wanted to see behind the curtain. I want to see what the hell is this guy in a recording studio? Or is it just in his garage? Is he sitting in his office like we're doing right now? And it was just in his garage. But he had a proper little studio.

And he was doing it. He was professional about it and had it going on. And so through that experience, we became friends. And very quickly after that, some changes that occurred. And he said, hey, you want to take over the podcast? And as it turned out, I looked at it very closely, and I decided that I wanted to start my own thing rather than take on somebody else's thing. But it was really the motivator.

So I'd seen behind the curtain, the show that we did, I realized what went into that, you know, from recording it to getting it onto the air and hearing it on the air. I guess hosted three shows for him, which did very, very well. And I'm like, I can do this. And so this was just this, this, this thing, 130 shows later was supposed to be what I did after leaving that job before I got the next job. But COVID came and some other stuff came and I got totally obsessed with this thing. and some people listened and, you know, anyways, now here I am. Yeah.

Three years later, 100-something thousand downloads, 130 shows. Got people, you know, yell at me when I'm driving through Baja. Hey, slow Baja. Hey, man. Yeah. So let's talk about the podcast. So, you know, it's interesting, right? Because when you go out and you look at podcasts about Baja, there are only a few.

And they are mainly about motorsports. You've cut a much wider swath through the peninsula with your subject matter and the people that you've spoken with. And I don't know if you have kind of a loose grouping of those things, but it's like a regional magazine of a type, right? It's just so broad and so deep in each of those things. Like, how do you identify your subjects? Do you have an overarching strategy for it? Or are you just kind of, you mean, 135 episodes in a couple of years? it really boils down to

it's so simple and I don't want to let people you know see into the the vast workings of slow Baja but it's simple if I'm curious about something somebody else is curious about something and if I'm curious about something

and I can get access to the person or the place or the thing that I'm curious about and I can sit down with them in their space and sometimes that's not possible sometimes you have to do it over the computer or phone or whatever but I'm guessing 95% of what I've done has been in person, in somebody's space, and doing this thing on a total shoe string, and that's not easy. But I do think it makes, I do think there's a difference.

And I haven't aired this episode yet, but a couple started listening to my show. They were up there in Wisconsin, and they just said, what the hell are we doing? You know, we're listening to Slow Baja. We're loving this talk about Baja. They went down to San Juanico on a vacation. because the husband likes to serve, sold their business in Minnesota, went into Wisconsin, rented their house out,

bought a house in San Juanico, and they're raising two kids in San Juanico now. So that show will come out and, you know, next one of the one after that. But, you know, if I'm interested in something, that's all it takes. There's no, there's no editorial board. It's just me.

Right. You know, I've got Sam Hurley, who's such a great photographer and editor. He puts the shows together for me, but basically, you know, it's me. And I think there are lots of reasons that people go to Baja, and I want to speak to all those things, the food, the wine, the surfing, the missions, the travel, the, obviously people go off-roading, and I'm always trying to moderate my personal interest in driving dirt roads, because that's not what everybody's interested in.

Not everybody's interested in, you know, 80-year-old former racers, Mary McGee, who's such an amazing woman now, off-road Motorsports Hall of Famer. Congratulations, Mary. Or Sal Fish, who, you know, was a magazine executive who basically Mickey Thompson tapped him to come to work with him in Baja. You know, he didn't know anything about Baja. He's a city slicker. Right.

He wore suits and took people out, you know, to five-star luncheons and sold them advertising. And all of a sudden he's driving a Volkswagen thing with no windshield and no doors through Baja, I'm marking a thousand mile courses for the new off-road racing series that he owns. And just hearing those stories, again, the whole thing there's 50, 60 years old. You know, it's like you've got to get these people while they're still, they still have their marbles. And all of the restaurateurs and hoteliers and it's just a ton of interesting stuff. And if you do listen to it, Ken, just give you such a broader perspective on Baja and the people. And, you know, I mean, a lot of people think of Baja,

and they think there's kind of the north end with Tijuana and Ensenada, and then there's Cabo. Yeah. Right. And you can fly into either. Yeah. And drive into one, but. And I think you and I are a line that all we want to do is get into the middle with our friend,

uh, Miguel Anhele Cueva and go see the mountains and the ranchers and take photos. And again, I think the thing that I keep coming back to, and again, I'm limited by, I don't speak Spanish well. So I'm, my audience is English, uh, speakers primarily. So I'm always trying to do the shows in English,

um, with, you know, Spanish, Spanish, native Spanish speakers who can speak English is super helpful. Um, but to get to,

um, some of these deeper, more authentic stories. For me, it keeps coming back to the people, the people, the people. Yeah.

You know, whether you're, a famed restaurant, restaurant, who are Javier Placencia. I want to know what that guy was like. I want to know that that guy was like at his place in the Valle de Guadalupe, where he's, you know, a rancher.

Yeah. And, you know, it's about meat and flame and all that. And I want to know what he was like when he was down at his restaurant in Toto Santos where he's, you know, the surfer. Yeah. And he was, you know, an amazing guy in both places. And I think super candid and open, you know, with me, I was saying with me and nobody, you know, podcast.

It's not like a Mike Wallace with 60 minutes coming to see you. But, you know, from 80-year-old racers, Johnny Johnson or, you know, the winemakers, Natalia Badan, who grew up in the Valle, and is the soul of the Valle de Guadalupe, now with, you know, a couple hundred winemakers there. She really spoke truth to what was going on with that scene. And I feel very honored that, you know, I had her on the show. And, you know, people may say Natalie Badon, but like a lot of people in the industry is like, wow. Did you hear that interview with her? She was amazing.

Yeah. So. Super cool. So I'm always on the hunt for amazing. Yeah. So the podcast is one way of taking people there, right? Whether they've been there or not and certainly exposing anybody who's been there to things they hadn't seen in the past. You have another way now that you're literally taking people to buy.

Let's talk about that a little bit. How did that come to be? What has happened so far? Where's it going? Yeah, and that's the slow Baja adventures. So, you know, I started on the Baja XL, I spent a lot of that time driving around by myself. You know, I don't know what Ted and I were doing. We'd have machochaun eggs in the morning.

We'd get our map out. We had the Baja almanac in those days. And we would just look at, you know, here we are today. here's where the campsite is for tonight. We didn't download GPS coordinates. We didn't know what everybody else was doing in the event. We used the Baja X-L as a 10-day excuse to go to Baja, the two of us, and have an adventure.

So one of these days, we're driving just by ourselves out in the middle of nowhere, and this land cruiser, more modern 90s land cruiser comes out of the blue from behind us, hammered down. It's just a speck behind us, and then it's right behind us, and then we're eating its dust, and it's a speck on the horizon. And I'm like, man, alive, do you see that thing? And it had graphics all over at, Nora, National Offroad Racing Association. So anyways, you know, the thing goes by us.

And I'm watching it in the distance something. Jeez, maybe I need a newer land cruiser. This old truck is just really beating us up and all that. And then before you know it, that truck is turned around and it's coming back the other way at us. I'm like, oh, great. We're now we're going to get carjacked or something, you know. We're out in the middle of nowhere. Anyways, they stop.

It's the Mexican side of the Nora National Offroad Racing Association. And we've got Fort Laez of Tequila, and it's the middle of the day. So we are figuring we're going to be cordial and offer them to those tequila shots, and they say no. I'm like, well, and Mexicans don't drink tequila in the middle of the day out in the middle of nowhere. Who are these guys? And it's long story short. We exchanged stickers. We had a minute.

They took off. They were mapping a course. They took off. and lo and behold, they invited Ted and I to participate in this new class that they had started called the Safari class. So we got an invite to participate in the Nora 500. We had such a fun time with that.

It was Kurt Leduc, Mark Stahl. So these guys are serious Baja racers. Kurt Sherbaum, who's a well-known Baja photographer, and then the class sponsor, Gerald Lee, who owned a big off-road outfitter. And then us. And they're wondering, like, who are the hell of these guys?

in this 50-year-old truck full of Fortaleys, and I'm driving with a Pith helmet. And, you know, we didn't want to go here or go there. We wanted to get back before dark every night and pour tequila. So, you know, we really kept these guys guessing who we were all about. Well, fast forward a year later, they gave me the class. They called the class the Slow Baja class. And it was my challenge to build it into something,

which I managed to get the new owner of Parnelli Jones's Broni Jones's Bronfell. the most famous off-road racing vehicle in history, which had just sold for $1.7 million, one-eight with fees, people will say. Got him to come to the dirt and come with us. And so those trips, those trips were so much fun showing people my slow Baja inside this infrastructure of this off-road race,

you know, where I had first trip, I wasn't in charge if I didn't have any responsibility. I didn't have any responsibility. There are four of us. Second trip, there are three of us. And then, you know, they put me in charge of it. And I managed to get 24 of us, you know, on this thing. Built it into real deal.

Well, fast forward, all of a sudden, I'm, you know, talking with LSAO, the, I'm doing a 2400-mile mapping trip. And LSAO says, you know, you really need to start leading your own trips. This is how you're going to, this is how you're going to keep slow Baja float. You know, this is what people want to do. Private trips, little group trips. do that, you know, so he planted this seed. My wife was just not having it.

Like, no way. Like, what are you nuts? You know, like, no. The answer is no. No. Well, long story short, I'm persistent and persuasive. And put together the slow Baja vintage. A friend had reached out and he does off-road motorcycle tours all over the United States and he wanted to do a Baja trip. And we'd met on the NORA 1,000 in 2022. he'd Adam Sheard, he had raced a 66 triumph down the peninsula.

And he said, hey, can you help me do a Baja trip? And I just thought, you know, this is way too good of an opportunity to do all this planning with this guy and then just walk away and let him do his motorcycle trip. I needed to open it up and take the risk, take the leap, take the marital heat, do all that and get it started. Because I knew that was really what, A, you know, that's what people want. That's what I want. And, you know, anyway, so we did it. And it was a hell of a success. And I have to say, thank you to you.

You came along as a photographer. You had a newer vehicle. And I said, no, you couldn't come with. You had to, you know, he had to go buy something old. And he said, I can't do that. I just got rid of my old Land Rover. And so I gave you a real job. And he did a real job.

And I have to say honest and sincere thanks for coming down and doing it. He brought Jamie Walmoguth, who was a friend from the 2019 Baja X-L and he was awesome. And so it was also really great to have somebody besides me capturing that event from the outside. And I think it was really the people that came. We had 12 vehicles and three staff vehicles. So we were a group of 30-ish moving down the peninsula in a group of 60, moving down the peninsula every night. And it was truly an astonishing trip.

And I think it was fairly successful. I think everybody had a hell of a time, frankly. Yeah. I think everybody had their hood open a little bit and got to fiddle a little bit, which gave them some level of, you know, sympathy towards when your hood's closed and it's the other guy's hood that's open. You know, you weren't looking at your watch saying, hey, I want to get to the beach. Don't we have a panga ready?

So I think it all worked out well, you know, five, six, six or seven states represented in 15 vehicles. Amazing. That was great. And you have another one coming up. I do in February. And this is the one trip a year where you can have a vehicle of any age. I think I'm really going to focus on vintage vehicles. I really like that vibe. I really like people who are willing to bring old things to Baja. And I think if you're coming to Baja with me and the thing is called Slow Baja, I think that that will get people understand we're here to go slow.

I always say we're here. It's like the mountain bikers. We're here to go slow and say hello. You know, that phrase of making mountain bikers more palatable to people who walk the trails. Go slow and say hello. That's my philosophy as well. Disminuya suvelocad. Slow down. A lot of people can take you to Baja to do fast stuff.

You know, wide open Baja X, you know, the guys who take their tundras and their raptors and they go airborne. Like, there's plenty of people to do that stuff. Right. I'm the only guy who's doing stuff that's slow and we're stopping. and I want to introduce you to this taco maker who's hand-making the tortillas, and I want to get you out on a whale-watching trip, and just really show you my Baja, my Slow Baja, and you've got to find the people who are sort of open to that.

And so Slow Baja as a brand and as a podcast and as a set of expeditions and all that kind of stuff, it's just been very organic and it's developed, right? It's not like you said one day. I'm going to create a brand and I'm going to go get a logo and I'm going to get a website. I'm going to do all this kind of stuff. It's kind of come together and I think it's been informed by the experiences you've had and the experiences that people have had with you and that kind of stuff.

What's it all about at this point? Like how would you pull it all together? Good question. You know, I would say it's me. It's my truck. But it's also a philosophy and without getting too woo-woo about it's just about really honestly slowing down being where you're are when you're there. And, you know, that stress-induced heart condition thing that I had at 21. Well, that's, that's popped back up, you know, a couple times over the ensuing decades.

And it always comes back at a time when I'm trying to do too much, you know, stressed about this, stressed about that. And Slow Baja is really just trying to put all that away and get people to get off of their dang phone. Get off of your dang phone. I mean, these things which have taken over our lives. You know, everybody's looking at their phone or their screen the whole time. And this also kind of dovetails into why I use paper maps. Paper map, you know, you're still looking around. Like, I'm the only guy in my event on the slow Baja's got the GPS track. And I'm glued to my dang, you know, phone screen on this trip. And that's not where I want to be. I really want to get people eyes up looking around, checking stuff out. And so where's it all going? You know,

what's the business model? Those things are questions that I don't have any. answers to like you know I'm doing this thing from the heart when I get um an extra 500 bucks together or a thousand bucks I'm getting hats made and t-shirts made and you know those are getting out into the world and that warms my heart to see folks uh rep and slow Baja in their communities and people who get it and send me notes about hey I saw your sticker I want to get a hat or this or that I mean but the whole thing it's it's very small it's very honest it is totally organic and um You know, I think the the Slow Baja

adventures, the newest part of this whole thing, is also going to be the most interesting part. I just had to back out of a trip with one of my Slow Baja alumni guests, Kevin and Nishon Vieve, who walked the El Camino Real. And they invited me to do a very,

very strenuous hike on the El Camino. And I would really like to offer mule-packing trips, hikes on the El Camino. Do these things with Slow Baja alumni who are leaders in their fields who are going to give a very small number of Slow Baja listeners a look at something that they would just not see otherwise.

They're just not going to get that at their local travel agency. So I think that's in the future, but again, it's all organic. And so the trip in February, God bless him, Slobaha alum, Raul, Rancho Labioti, has been so persistent and just you need to start your trip at my ranch. It's like it's cold in Takati in February. I don't really want to start my trip at your ranch, but, you know, when he offers to,

I hate to say this on the, you know, on the show, but he's going to slaughter a lamb and get it on a spit, and it's going to be something spectacular, and you're not going to get that thing elsewhere. That's from Raul's heart to me, because of what I've done for him, and it's authentic, and that's the focus of the trip. So we're going to have another ranch night,

and it's going to be bonfires and singing and they're going to make food and breakfast. And, you know, I'm working on a very, very special experience in San Ignacio that I don't want to talk about yet. But those are the things that make me very, very excited to be able to travel at another level and for me to be able to share my slow Baja with others and hopefully keep the whole thing afloat. And so some of the people you've interviewed over the course of time, you've found a line. in this kind of slow Baja philosophy in some sometimes surprising places, right? People who were motorsports icons

who spent their whole lives driving as fast as they could through Baja, you found kind of a center of gravity around this concept. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, as you say that, I think immediately of Johnny Johnson, who was just an amazing guy,

112 career victories, off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame, but just a humble dude living south of San Felipe. And his buddy from high school, Lynn Cheneth, lives down the dirt road there and has the Chenet Lodge. And I was trying to get Johnny to do an interview. And, you know, you can't, Johnny's not answering his phone. Johnny's not. You got to meet him at, you know, the Chenet Lodge and sit down and have a beer with them to talk to him because he's not answering Facebook messages and whatnot.

not so Roger Mears' wife, Carol, was so instrumental in getting me connected with Lynn and getting me connected with Johnny. But I went to do the interview with Johnny this past February, and I had a filmmaker with me. Johnny's just not there. So Lynn's got to go to his house, wake him up, bring him down. And I'm so glad that, like, I didn't have, you know, I was with the Baja Exel. I had all these things I had to do. But like, I was so glad that I just said, you know, I'm here. I need to stay on brand, where I end up.

staying sleeping tonight is not as important as being right here right now and waiting for this guy, this 80-year-old legend, to come down and see me and talk about his career. And Johnny said, again, the guys, you know, with George Plimpton and, you know, ABC sports and, you know, 100-something victory, 112 victories. Johnny said, you got to slow down. Get to Baja, you got to slow down. And it just was so moving coming from him. who'd been coming to Baja since, you know, the early 60s and had so much success going fast.

You know, Pete Springer, who's one of my very first interviews, said, I passed Johnny Johnson once. Once. Then he passed me right back after I broke down, you know. And so, but, you know, Ivan Stewart's super generous and also, you know, said basically the same thing. The reason that he's living in Baja part of the years, he just likes to slow his life down. Cool. Well, just to bring it all together, anything else that you would want to close with, anything you'd want people to know, like, you don't get interviewed on this podcast often. I don't. I mean, it's awkward for me to say, you know, it's been an obsession. It's been basically all I've done for the last three years. So I hope the folks who are listening and have taken the time to listen, I want to say thanks, sincere thanks. It's also, you know, there's not much behind the curtain.

So if you're enjoying this show and you're into the, you know, you're taking a deep dive on slow bah. I always say drop a taco in the tank because it really does matter and it really does help keep me doing the show. Wilson's been so helpful to help me with recording this today and coming down and doing the photography on my show. But really, if you have a suggestion, like people send me, not very often, but people have sent me some suggestions. and one suggestion that was really amazing. I had never heard of the writer before. Christian Beamish, who's a surfboard shaper in Ventura, he had an obsession to build a boat and to sail it.

And to sail, there's an 18-footer open sailboat, and he sailed it down to Baja, taught himself to sail, sailed out to the Channel Islands, and then sailed down to Baja and did this remote surfing trip and should have died, ended up getting, you know, no sleep multiple days and getting basically saved by some fishermen out on Cedrus Island and got a, you know, towed in and was given, you know, people who have nothing gave him, gave him everything and allowed him to recover. And he wrote just a stunning book about a voyage of the Comeran. And a reader,

a listener out of the blue, said, hey, you should, you should check this guy out. And I did. And Christian was kind enough during COVID to agree to an interview in his garage. We sat, you know, eight feet apart from each other with masks on because COVID was just blown up then. We didn't know anything about it. And it was just amazing, again, to have these experiences. And later, I'm down in Guerrero Negro interviewing Zeehul Martinez. And the guy who had given me that tip is parked in, he's camping in Zeehul's front yard. And again, when you drive with your name on the side of the car,

and I back in to park to go whale watching, he's like, oh, hey, slow Baja. I'm like, oh, hey. He's like, yeah, I sent you that tip about Christian Beamish. I'm like, oh, my God, here it is, you know, full circle. You know, he never wrote me a note to say thanks, and I'd never taken the time to go through a thousand emails to say, hey, who was that guy who sent me that Christian Beemus tip and thanked him? And there we were.

And, you know, I was able to thank him in the show notes. And so, you know, I am honestly always looking for the next podcast, always looking for the next conversation. I shouldn't say podcast. I'm always looking for the next conversation. That's what I'm striving for. So if you're listening and you're saying, oh, you know, I'd love to know more about this or you should know my friend who does that, I'd love to hear it. So you can always tap the Slow Baja contact link at Slow Baja and send me a message, read them all, and I respond to them all. and when you buy a hat or a t-shirt,

I always send it with a handwritten thank you note and a couple of stickers. So if you're thinking about supporting the show, that's a good way to do it. Other than that, you know, I'm going to be down in Baja as much as I can and as much as my marriage will allow in 2024 and we've got the slow Baja.

I call it the Slow Baja, the trip in February, February 23rd through March 1st, Takate to San Ignacio and up to San Felipe in seven days. days. It's going to be a good, fun, slow roll. And then I have the Slow Baja Vintage in Baja sewer in October. And I would guess that there might be two other events, if I'm lucky, that'll get onto the calendar. So hopefully we'll also find a chance to go mule packing or fishing or a photography trip with Miguel on Hell or something else. We'll start the non-motorized

portion of Slow Baja adventure. So stay tuned. Super cool. Well, thanks for appearing on your podcast today. And thanks for having me as a guest host. It's been an honor. Well, I appreciate you doing it, Wilson. Thanks, buddy. And I hope to see you in Baja soon. Same here. All right, we did it. Hey, well, I hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation with me.

I don't think I went into why I wear a Pith helmet. Maybe I will have to do another conversation someday down the road and talk about that, why I love the Piff helmet. But anyways, if you like what I'm doing, I'm going to ask you to support the show any way you can. That could be going to Slowbaha.com and signing up for a Slow Baja adventure. That could be buying some merch at the Slow Baja shop. I've got some great sweatshirts. Still a few sweatshirts left for you bigger guys, XL, double XLs.

Got some T-shirts, hats and all flavors, stickers, of course, and that deluxe canvas shopping bag. I've been using mine a lot. used it as a carry-on on my holiday travels. Just used one flying to California yesterday. You know, you've got that secure zipper. It's got an interior zipper pocket. You can put your keys in there, your money, all that stuff. When you go through the security, and then it fits nicely underneath the seat in front of you

and still gives you a little room for your feet. So check them out at slowbaha.com. If you don't have any tacos in your pocket, well, you can always say something nice. Write a review, a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Spotify now has reviews. So if you like what I'm doing, please review the show, help other people find it. Say something nice about me. And I want to say something nice about Mary McGee. She's so cool. She's in the off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame now. She went to a New Year's Eve party in 62, 1962. Met Steve McQueen. Actually, she knew Steve McQueen, but Steve was at the party, told her to get out to Baja and start riding a dirt bike. And she did. And she raced the Nora 1000. and the 500 first person to solo the 500. Anyhow, Steve loved Baja. He said Baja was life.

Anything that happens before or after is just waiting. You know, people always ask me, what's the best modification that I've ever made to slow Baja? Without a doubt, it's my Shielman seats. You know, Toby at Shield Man USA could not be easier to work with. He recommended a Vario F for me and a Vero F XXL for my navigator, Ted's kind of a big guy. And Toby was absolutely right. The seats are great and they fit both of us perfectly. And let me tell you, after driving around Baja for over a year on these seats, I could not

be happier. Shieldman, slow Baja approved, learn more and get yours at shielman.com.