For some reason I woke up well before my alarm this morning, so I took advantage of the early hour and got ready and went down to the beach to watch the sunrise. It was quite peaceful, with only a few other people about.
I came back to the room and gathered everyone up to go out to the front to meet Carlos for our sales pitch morning and afternoon in Todos Santos. A taxi took us to the Diamante resort where we were dropped off by a massive lagoon pool where we met our sales rep for the morning, Alejandro. My first impression of Alejandro was that he was a little abrupt and didn’t seem like he would be a joy to be around. However after we ate breakfast together and started touring the property he warmed up and he wasn’t so bad. He even told a few funny jokes and a couple that none of us got. The property was very nice, but really geared towards golfers as it is a highly rated golf course that Tiger Woods had endorsed. The first rooms he showed us overlooked the golf course with the ocean way out in the distance. That really wouldn’t be my vibe or something I would invest in. We then took a shuttle down to the beach front condos that they were still in the process of finishing, as building had only started 4 months ago. He took us to a 4 bedroom condo that overlook the ocean. It was magnificent! Why we didn’t take any pictures, I don’t know. We asked him how much it was to buy it outright and he said $2.4 million. Guess we won’t be buying that anytime soon. It was nice to dream for a minute though.
After completing the tour they brought us back for the real sales pitch. Alejandro was throwing around a bunch of numbers and I was only half-listening because I knew we weren’t going to be buying whatever they were selling. At this point we had already been there for 2 1/2 hours and now we were to the point where Alejandro went to get his boss, so the boss could try to close the deal. Joe was an American originally from Connecticut. He was nice and trying to do his job, but we continued to say we weren’t interested. At some point, I think he finally just gave up as I feel like it then ended abruptly. They led us to the front and called Carlos to come pick us up.
By this time is was Noon so any hopes of getting back for beach/pool time were long gone. We all piled into Carlos’ car (4 of us squished in the back) and made the hour our so drive to Todos Santos. Carlos took us to a few stores (probably friends of his) where we enjoyed browsing, but didn’t buy anything. The next stop was to the Hotel California where we watched an artist make a clay fountain in about 3 minutes. It was pretty impressive. Then Carlos had him make a cat for us and said if we liked it we could buy it, if not no big deal. Well I think the cat looked more like a chichua, so I wasn’t interested in it, but we did tip the artist for watching him and moved on. We next stopped into a homemade candy shop. We tried several free samples and paid entirely way too much money for some candy. We then asked Carlos to take us to a restaraunt where the locals eat. He took us to a tucked away restaraunt that served very good Mexican food. It’s probably the best meal we have eaten on the trip thus far and it was relatively inexpensive. After lunch he took us to the mission, city hall, and to a few more shops. He then asked us if we would like to roam on our own or if we were ready. I had noticed there was geocache close to where we parked the car, so I explained geocaching to Carlos and on the hunt we went. The coordinates took us to a park where it was super busy with kids playing and skateboarding. The hint eluded that the cache would be under a bench, but there were several benches and the GPS would not even come close to a ground zero. For some reason I could only get to within 50 feet. That is not super helfpul when you are looking for a bison tube in a packed park. We checked a couple of benches, but after reading the prior logs and seeing it hasn’t been found in a while I gave up. Too bad, I really would have like to shown Carlos what we were looking for. We crammed back into his car and he brought us back to our hotel. The time was now a little after 5:00.
Tom and I went to the bar and got a Dirty Monkey and headed down to the beach to discuss the day and watch the sunset. With the sun down I headed up to the restaurants and secured a 7:45 reservation for the Italian restaurant. The menu was pretty limited and the food was just mediocre. Tom and Pete’s chicken was lukewarm at best. Ryan, Laurie, and I had the shrimp linguini that was lacking seasoning. Pete tried a taco from the taco truck when we walked out, and he said that it was delicious. We headed back to the rooms and called it a night.
Stats of the Day
Steps Walked: 15969
Geocaches Attempted: 1
Geocaches Found: 0
