Once in San Felipe, I cruised around the small city in search of WiFi but gave up after finding the quality so poor as to be unusable for updating my reset phone. The typical touristy downtown Malecon was full of street vendors, bars, taco stands and sunburnt gringos in their 60s. Stopping up on the highway at a delightfully smelling quesadillaria, I ordered a quesedilla and ate it amid the blowing sand on and small plastic table that threatened to take flight. Finishing the last crunchy bites of my gritty lunch, I figured I'd seen enough of this area and would see if I could find a place out of the wind and sand to camp or break.
Riding north from San Felipe, the highway widens and passes miles of private resorts and guarded condo communities until turning inland to the inhospitable dry lake bed of Laguna Salada where a sandstorm blew across the expanse and foreboding clouds dumped on the western mountains. MexicalI was only an hour ride away and something kept pulling me northward with a comfortable finality that I was still grappling with. Originally I had intended to spend a month down here but without a set destination, friends to meet or specific goal in mind, the desert sw of the US seemed just as comfortable a destination as the tip of Cabo. I was okay with that and the gusty tailwind seemed to affirm my decision.