12/23/24-Monday-Day 17 “Dimes from Grimes!”

Not wanting to spend the Christmas holiday on a potentially busy beach we pack up camp this morning with plans to head into the mountains. Josh and Darci have errands to run in La Paz before going south so they are the first to leave while us, Mark and Michele take a bit more time to get on the road. We make our way off of the beach and proceed south with plans of meeting Josh, Darci and Hannah at camp. 

After a couple of hours on the road the group is quite famished and Michele mentions a restaurant in the town of Santiago that we can try before we turn off of pavement and head up the dirt road to our chosen camp. After we park the truck in the town square and while I get the dogs out, Heather asks me a bit of a rhetorical question, “so, how much would you say a 2 peso coin is in U.S. dollars?” 

Story time! In November of 2018 my papaw, Dale Grimes, lost his fight with cancer and left us and this world much too soon. Unfortunately he passed before we began this journey that we are currently on and I have never gotten to share any of our stories from the road with him. While working our first camp hosting gig in Colorado for the summer of 2023 we would often find loose change while cleaning campsites. Pennies, nickels, and the occasional quarter but we began to notice a disproportionate amount of dimes. Wondering if there could be any significance to the dimes we did some searching and found that dimes specifically can be a sign from a loved one saying hello. From that day on any time either of us finds a stray dime on the ground, and we’ve found them in some of the most out of the way and random places, we smile and say “Dimes from Grimes” and we are reminded that no matter where we are, no matter how far from civilization we get, we are not alone on this adventure, my papaw is right there with us!

Heather’s 2 peso coin that she just found beside our parked truck in a small rural town square in Baja California Sur is our first Mexican “dime” and we are both all smiles walking into the restaurant for lunch! After our meal we begin the climb out of town on a dusty, bumpy, winding road bound for Rancho San Dioniso where we plan to spend the next few days. When we pull in to the ranch Josh, Darci, and Hannah are already there and we find space next to them to assemble our little three rig courtyard!