House sitting in La Penita De Jaltemba, and an awesome day trip

Here we are on the first few days of our house sitting gig, and all I can say is WOW!

Actually that is not all I can say, I can tell you that La Penita is really hot right now and that it is the off season. The former is not too bad with a car and midday siestas, and the latter is a blessing.

Other than that I can tell you that La Penita embodies everything I love about Mexico, the all you really need, rough and ready, she’ll be right way of living that seems to permeate through every aspect of Mexican culture, and it suits us down to the ground.

San Pancho beach down the road from our house sit

A shrine near Guayabito beach near my hopeful launch spot

Guayabitos Beach, local style!

The town of La Penita is a lovely little place with the main tourist area of Guayabitos down the road a bit. It has everything you need (aside from Mega) and more. The seafood is caught right off the beach and sold right on the beach for a song; we have a mango tree with hundreds of mangoes just about ready to be picked and all sorts of fruit is sold everywhere for next to nothing. Our views (yes views, plural) need to be seen to be believed.

Off to one side is the ocean with a little island in the middle, and off to the other are the mountains often shrouded in rain and mist. We watch the sun rise over the jungle covered mountains, and watch it set over the Pacific ocean.

View of La Penita town and beach from our House sit rooftop patio

The view in the opposite direction

The home we are house sitting is enormous! A closed-for-the summer bed and breakfast, with a pool on the roof, a four car garage for me to tinker with my paramotor, and two cute cats who are slowly but surely beginning to warm to us and keep us company.

We sit up on the roof every evening watching the sunset and repeatedly murmuring to each other things like “Can you believe this is our lives…” or “Can you believe we wondered if we were doing the right thing leaving our old lives behind?..”

The answer to both is “Yes I can”. Although it seems almost impossible to be living this crazy dream, we are doing it, and have been for almost two and a half years now. And although I could never go back to my previous life, this current one seems so outrageously perfect that I can understand how I never believed it could exist for normal folk.

But it does, you just have to take a step in the right direction. Life is being ridiculously good to us at the moment and I am very happy to be able to appreciate it to its fullest.

I put together a little video of our first couple days house sitting here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHACJa4UlYY?rel=0]

What I haven’t added is the spontaneous adventure we went on today. We woke up early because it was hot and decided to hit the road around 7am. We were just sorta driving looking for good launching beaches, not really searching too hard and letting the road take us.

As it turns out, it took us along a beautiful winding coastal road past tiny little towns smothered in seafood restaurants and qaint local scenes. At one stop we watched locals cleaning buckets full of fresh oysters, and even got a free one (Sarah did, it was a bit early for me) shucked and limed in front of us. Sarah says it is the best she ever had.

Free oyster freshly shucked, for breakfast…

Then as we reached the end of our drive for the day in a little town called San Blas, we saw a few restaurants with giant marlin fillets and… Lobster!

With next to no twisting of my arm we settled in for an 11 am breakfast of three lobster, a giant marlin fillet and accouterments while watching Mexico play football, with a restaurant full of strangely laid back football fans.

One of several restaurants cooking up a seafood storm

Split and garlic-ked lobster ready to be devoured

The whole meal came to about $25 with drinks and although disappointed Mexico lost the game, we left feeling pretty damn satisfied. On the drive back home we stopped in a little town which seemed to specialize in Banana bread and for the princely sum of $2 bought a whole freshly baked loaf of the stuff.

Now here we are back home with a cool breeze blowing in from the Pacific Ocean and contemplating a nap. I cannot believe this is my life now, I am ridiculously grateful for it and the ability to share it with anyone who reads this blog.

I hope you also had a great weekend and I’ll see you on the flip side. Peace.

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