It all started when my dear friend Dori and her daughter, Lily and Lily’s girlfriend, Annabel came from the US to stay in their home nearby us for a week. They wanted to go to Cabo San Lucas and hike to the iconic arch. Dori said they had done this before, so I gladly accepted the invitation to go with them. I have hiked a lot in my life and think it’s fun. Just because I’m 71 doesn’t mean I can’t hike anymore, right? But I wore flip flops? Really? What the heck was I thinking?

I drove us to Lands End in Cabo by the marina and after parking and avoiding several annoying salesmen trying to get us to buy a boat trip, we got to the beach on foot. That’s where this hike was going to start. But it has been quite a few years since Dori had gone to the arch. The pathway she’s sure they took back then is fenced off.

 

No stopping us though, and we decided to follow the path up Mt. Solmar and see if we could drop down onto a trail to the beach where the arch is.

 

Doesn’t look like much of a trail, does it?

 

This wasn’t a problem for quite a long way, but we realized early on that this wasn’t going to be ending well. The beach is not in the direction we were going, and it got pretty steep without much of a trail. We sent the teen-age girls up alone to see if they could see a trail going down to the beach.

My flip flops made this a tenuous experience. Also, every time I reached for a rock as a hand-hold, there was a little cactus waiting to greet me. Oops. The views from where we were made it worth it though.

 

 

After the girls had gone higher and checked it out, we realized this wasn’t what we wanted to do and we started back down.

I definitely rue the day I didn’t wear my hiking boots or my tennis shoes at the very least. Without support and traction, I was not doing that well. I started to lose my footing at one point and reached out to hold onto a rock, but there was a cactus in that very spot, so in a split second I decided to jump, instead of fall. I landed on some loose rocks, jarring my knees and fell on my butt. Ouch. Not only was I trying to hike in these stupid shoes, I hadn’t had breakfast. It was about 11:30am at this point. The fall made me feel achy and woozy.

I would have kicked myself if that had been possible. Stupid me. At least I brought water along, but it was already half gone.

Turned out that we could see a better (level) path after we got down that headed in the direction we wanted. Dori remarked that she should have listened to her intuition in the first place, as it was pretty obvious that going up this rocky mountain wasn’t going to get us to the arch.

Taking this nice path made for a sweet adventure that ended with more splendid views, but we never made it to the arch. One would have to be a mountain goat to get down the rocks to the beach. Or be wearing better footwear. And maybe being a little younger would have helped me. At any rate, we decided to get back to the beach where we started.

 

We had the privilege to see lots of jumping rays as our finale.

 

We left the beach to the local children and headed to the restaurant to meet our spouses for lunch.

Maybe I’ve learned my lesson too.

Flip flops do not make good hiking footwear.