Over winter break, my family and I went on vacation to beautiful Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. It was an awesome vacation, and we went to the beach every day. It was a perfect trip in my mind, but a perfect trip has to have a few “adventures”. My favorite “adventure” was the day that I learned to surf. It was a classic Griswald-type outing.

My sister had gone surfing before with her friends, because she lives in California, but I had never come close. I am not an olympic champ at swimming, so I was pretty nervous about learning to surf. My sister assured me that I would have an awesome time, and I knew how to wakeboard, so it should be pretty easy to learn how to surf.

We found the surf shop near us and talked to the person at the front desk about lessons:

“Oh, sure. Go out to the beach, and they will take care of you!” said the woman in charge.

“We don’t have to pay here, or ride a shuttle, or anything?” my mom asked pretty skeptically.

“No, go to the beach. They will take care of everything. Here’s the map. Follow route 1 to the beach!” (Red flag: nothing is as easy as “follow route 1″)

“So we just follow this road all the way there?”

“Yeah! It will take about 2 hours. Go have fun, and then come back and buy a shirt!”

“Ok, thank you,” said my mom.

We weren’t ten minutes away from the shop before we realized that it might take longer than 10 minutes. The speed limit is clearly posted as 40 or 60 km/h, but no seems to pay any attention to the signs, because even 80 km/h is too slow. So we figured that the cashier was talking about how it takes when she is driving.

So we are following Route 1, and we get to the city of Cabo San Lucas. The signs are a little confusing, because they are all the same, so we had to guess a little bit as to which direction we needed to go.

“Cabo Pacifica! Just follow those signs, that should get us to the beach. I think it’s the Pacific side of Cabo.” My mom was the navigator for the day, so she was riding shotgun spotting the signs.

We followed the signs for “Cabo Pacifica” all the way through town and out the other side. Unfortunately, this side of town was looking a little sketchy and the road narrowed the farther that we drove. Finally, we reached a cul-de-sac. We were not even close to any beach, so we figured that we missed a turn. Driving back, we saw a sign that points to “Cabo Pacifica”, so we followed it up the hill. (Red flag: Up the hill?)

After a few minutes we reached the gate for the Cabo Pacifica resort. Apparently, the street signs were also signs for hotels, resorts, and restaurants. We asked the guard at the gate how to get to the beach, and if we were close. He was pretty nice, because he obviously knew that we were way off. He told us to head back the city, and turn right at a liquor store, left at Don Miguel, and keep going for an hour. Sounds great! We thanked him and headed back out on our adventure.

We got back to the city and flew right past Don Miguel, and into the oncoming traffic of a one-way.

“Holy crap! They should put up signs for one-ways!” my dad said a little frustrated. (He has a detached retina, and the surgery didn’t fix it properly, so he couldn’t see well out of one eye. It was making him nervous trying to drive with one good eye.)

So we looped around the one-ways four times before we got lost again. We stopped at a “Mini-Super” (like a mini super-market, get it?) and asked for directions. Well, first we asked for someone that could speak a little english, so that we could go use both English and Spanish to talk to them. I think that it was the store manager that helped us. My mom talked to him while we sat in the car.

My mom minored in Spanish, so she was doing pretty well talking to this guy. They were having a pretty in depth conversation, and I was only able to translate a few things: 6 blocks, left, 2 blocks, right. Then some other guy walks up to my dad’s window and taps on it so my dad will roll it down.

“1 block. Straight to route 1.” Then he walked away. My dad said thanks at the same time that my mom was saying thank you and getting back in the car. They turn to each other and start talking about which way to go, but decide that one block is better than 6. Of course, it takes 3 one-ways to get 1 block over, but we made.

We finally found route 1 for our adventure to continue for another hour! There’s more to the story, but maybe some other time.