Baja-Bound Along Memory Lane

Five decades ago, Mike Breining and his father drove to the southern tip of Baja California in a 1929 Model A Ford.

Today, Breining plans to leave his Fallbrook home for the southern tip of Baja California in a 1929 Model A Ford. With him will be his grandson.

As a 9-year-old boy, Breining took his first trip south of the border with his father in 1941. They didn’t go very far, probably no farther than Rosarito Beach or perhaps Ensenada, in their Model A truck. But it was the first of many trips that have dotted the intervening 50 years of his life.

In those early days, Breining recalled, they packed up the old Model A truck with essentials--12 spare tires, two 55-gallon barrels of gasoline, engine oil, water, beef jerky, beans and canned grapefruit sections.

“We looked like something out of Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ ” he recalled.

“I’ve been threatening to write a book on our Baja trips for years,” Breining, 59, said, “and this anniversary trip will help me to recall some of those earlier times.”

On one 1940s-era jaunt, Breining and his father, Walter M. Breining Sr., stopped off in El Marmol, then an active marble quarry. From there they took a two-day side trip into the mountains, seeking Robert Bisbee, a 75-year-old gold prospector who had drifted south to Baja California seeking the mother lode that had produced millions of dollars of placer gold in the peninsula’s canyon streams. Bisbee never found his gold but the Breinings found Bisbee.

“We nearly died of thirst,” Breining recalled of the mule trip into the mountains. “It was more than 100 degrees at sunrise.”

But he also remembers reaching the crest of the Sierras and seeing, for the first time, the panorama to the east: the Sea of Cortez like molten gold, the mainland mountains, clear and sharp, the islands and mainland coast etched as if on a map.

“It was a most beautiful sight. No air pollution. Never again,” Breining said, sighing at the lost past.

There are few pictures of those early trips, Breining says. His father took many photographs on a 1946 trek to Cabo San Jose at the southern tip of the 1,000-plus-mile peninsula, but, after returning to the United States via the Mexican mainland, the photographs and negatives were blown away in a fierce windstorm that hit the adventurers as they drove homeward through Arizona.

Only one roll of film, stashed in Breining’s duffel bag, survived. It showed that first ’29 Model A next to a donkey wagon on the salt flats near San Quintin and a shot of Breining’s father sprawled on the sand, the victim of a clam-digging tine through his foot.

Sixteen-year-old Adam McDonald, Breining’s grandson, will ride shotgun on this nostalgic journey. McDonald, a veteran Baja traveler himself, will take his boogie board, although he thinks the off-road trip will be more sand than surf. The board came in handy as the two began packing the truck bed, forming an upper shelf to hold the solar panels that will provide power for camp lighting or any needed battery boosts.

On this trip, there will be a few extras that the ‘40s travelers never thought of. An inflatable raft, lots of bungie cords and dozens of hose clamps--devices that Breining has found indispensable in repairing just about anything that breaks on a Model A. There will be nylon hammocks, Ziploc plastic bags, duct tape, candy suckers, insect repellent, folding tables, chairs and cots.

There also will be a few items that made those first trips in the 1940s, including a battered shovel for digging the truck out of the sandy soil, a soot-coated coffee pot, a tow chain and a “Baja fan belt” fashioned out of tire casings and connected with harness rivets.

Breining, who retired from 38 years as a Mercedes-Benz repair shop owner only two days before starting his 50th-anniversary Baja trip, concedes that it might seem a bit unloyal to choose a Ford for his adventure.

“But that’s what we drove, my dad and I,” Breining said, patting the dark green hood of truck that is like the ’29 Model A of his youth.

Breining and his grandson will follow as faithfully as possible the old roads, animal paths and tracks that Breining and his father traveled so long ago, starting from El Rosario, where Dona Anita Espinosa, proprietress of Espinosa’s Place, will send them on their way with a fiesta celebrating the long friendship she has had with the Breinings, father and son.

They will avoid the paved roads and the towns that have turned into tourist meccas, with discotheques and neon lights, and will stick to the byways, stopping at the sleepy fishing villages and mountain towns that the rest of the world has passed by.

They plan to arrive at the tip of the peninsula before July 11, in time to see the solar eclipse from the secluded home of a longtime friend, avoiding the masses of visitors expected to deluge the Cabo San Lucas area for the once-in-a-lifetime event.

Is this the last trip that Breining, now pushing 60, will take to his beloved Baja?

“Hell, no!” he said. “I’m just getting started.”