The Problem – I needed to renew my Canadian Passport. To do this, I basically had two options.
1. Take a trip back to Canada & visit the Passport office in Victoria
2. Visit the Canadian Consulate in Cabo San Lucas
I chose option #2, to visit the Canadian Consulate in Cabo San Lucas, which is a 7 hour drive from Puerto Escondido.
With that decision made, we now had to figure a way to get there from here. Sailing there wasn’t an option as the anchorage there is not very good & the cost of dock space in Cabo is astronomical! Next up was the bus, which takes about 9 hours & was more expensive than we had expected. It also didn’t sound very fun.
So what to do? Well, do what we always do, turn this into an adventure!
It all started by meeting another cruiser here who lived in Cabo for a few years. He was able to tell us about a place to stay in Cabo for cheap, as well as directions. Then Pedro arranged for a rental car at an amazing price. The next day we packed a few clothes & headed South to Cabo.
We drove for about 4 1/2 hours and arrived in La Paz, where we all agreeded to spend the night. But first, we visited the local McDonald’s & had our Big Mac fix! We spent the night at the Marina Hotel, where Joh & Kids enjoyed a night of TV & I enjoyed the real high speed internet.
The next morning we were back on the road again, next destination CABO. Three hours later we arrived & thanks to our directions we found our hotel within 15 minutes. The CABO CUSH Hotel offered us a special flat rate of 500 Pesos ($40 CDN). What a surprise this hotel turned out to be. It was gorgeous & quaint, a classic courtyard design, they call it a Boutique Hotel.
My next task was to find a photo store that could take my passport photos. I had passport photos taken in Loreto, but they turned out to be the wrong size. To my surprise, the photo store was just around the corner from the hotel. 80 Pesos & 1 1/2 hour later I picked up my Canadian passport photos. With that out of the way, we could now go & check out CABO, which was only a 2 block walk from our hotel.
I have two words for Cabo – Expensive & Crazy! I will admit that it does have a beautiful beach / coastline, but beyond that it’s like little America, English is the language spoken & most prices at in USD. We knew this before coming, and spent the afternoon being “tourists”. It was a fun time. We headed back to our hotel, picked up a case of beer & just relaxed.
Dinner that night was fish & scallop tacos with all the fixins, the taco stand was 2 blocks off the strip & thankfully true Mexican.
We were up early the next morning, as we now needed to drive 20 minutes to San Jose Del Cabo, where the Canadian Consulate is located. The renewal process was simple & we were finished in 1 hour. Happy that we had completed our mission, we headed back North to La Paz. There we had to complete our final mission, that being Provisioning. So we did our rounds at WalMart & SAM’s Club. At Sams Club, we were able to buy a new underwater digital camera (thanks to Nana & Poppa Trolley). Now no excuses for no Pics.
We stayed another night at the Marina Hotel & enjoyed SUBWAY, it had been almost 2 years since we had that, of course Johanna did an amazing job of ordering all the ingredients in Spanish.
Finally, the next day we all slept in, then enjoyed a huge Mexical breakfast. 4 1/2 hours later we arrived back to Puerto Escondio, our home for the last few months. Both Lucy & Ocean Blue II were glad to see us!
The trip was a ton of fun, it felt like a vacation & was nice to be a tourist for a few days. But as always, we were excited to be back on Ocean Blue.
Back in Loreto we couriered the Official passport package to the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City. It has since arrived there & if all goes as planned, I should have my new passport in hand in 7 days.
So that is the story of our passport adventure, much more fun than just visiting your local passport office back home 
FYI – links to our hotels where we stayed, we recommend them both.
CABO CUSH – Cabo
HOTEL MARINA – La Paz
