When we started planning our move to Mexico, one thing became clear fast: driving to Baja was going to be its own adventure, separate from all the paperwork and logistics that got us here. This post is just about the drive itself, the five days it took to relocate our family, two cats, a dog, and a five year old from Texas to Baja California Sur. If you’re looking for the residency process, the legal requirements, or the actual how to behind moving to Mexico, that’s a separate post. This one’s just the story.
We have both sworn, on everything we hold sacred, to never make this drive again. I think we both have a little PTSD from it. It was an experience, to say the least.
The Packing (Or: How We Learned What We’re Actually Made Of)
We had a plan. The plan was wrong, but we had one.
After cramming every available square inch of our Nissan Rogue, including the roof, because apparently roofs are just floors for people who’ve run out of floor, we hit the road on a cloudy afternoon in late May 2026. I was driving, and the audio was already queued up: the full cast recording of the Harry Potter series, all seven books, because if we were going to spend five days trapped in a car with two cats plotting against each other, we were at least going to do it with Stephen Fry’s narration keeping us company. My husband, W., took the passenger seat, flanked by two bags and a pillow like he was bracing for impact. He was right to.
The back seat was a small, furious zoo.
Finn, our five-year-old, sat buckled into his booster seat, guarding the crown jewel of the operation: my Mother’s Day gift, a fancy-dancy photo printer, riding shotgun in the seat beside him like visiting royalty. It had to come. Of course it had to come. On top of the printer sat a pee pad, and on the pee pad sat a cat carrier. Beside that cat, another cat, in a separate carrier, not because we’re short on carriers, but because Chicken has Opinions about how much Ducky talks, and Ducky was not going to survive four days of being slapped every time he made a sound. Diplomacy, achieved through separation. Write that on our tombstones.
And then there was Red, our best-guess fifteen-year-old rescue mutt, a medium-sized dog who sheds like it’s her calling in life. We’d bought seat covers specifically so she wouldn’t destroy the car, and she spent the drive tucked into the floorboard behind me, chin resting on the console, breathing hot dog breath directly into my ear as a running commentary on her displeasure. Underneath her, a bag of cat litter. Beside that, a bag holding the portable litter box, cat and dog food, treats, and enough medication to gently sedate everyone in the car who wasn’t me or W. (The story of how Ducky tried to preemptively end the road trip by drinking cleaning fluid a week before we left is its own post. He’s fine. He’s dramatic. Those are related facts.)
Finn had his backpack of toys, his tablet, and a neck pillow wedged under his feet. It was, in summary, a wee bit cramped, especially for two adults with sciatic nerve issues who were about to fold themselves into a car for five days like it owed them money, accompanied by a boy wizard who, unlike us, owed nothing to anyone.
Day 1: Texas Is Big and Has Opinions About That
Six hours to Midland. There was a whole lotta nothin’ on this stretch, which, generously, describes most of the drive from Dallas to the border crossing at Mexicali. Harry was already at Hogwarts. We were still in Texas. Texas has a way of making you feel like the Sorcerer’s Stone is a more efficient use of time than the highway you’re currently on.
Night one, we found a cheap hotel that would take animals, booked, like everything else on this trip, through Booking.com, purely for the points, no affiliation, just genuine devotion. We checked in, hauled the luggage cart back to the room, and that’s when W. realized the full weight of his packing decisions: our suitcases were buried on the roof, under a Jenga tower of precariously zip-tied belongings. There was no talking him out of excavating them himself, so the rest of us went ahead with the cat carriers, the litter, the dog, and what I can only describe as The Animal Bag.
I’d brought a pop-up play pen for the cats, thinking they could have a supervised, contained little breather out of their carriers. A lovely plan. It would have worked beautifully, if Ducky hadn’t been crying in existential terror and Chicken hadn’t been furious at the universe and expressing that fury by hissing and slapping him every time he so much as breathed. So I let them roam free instead, for everyone’s sanity, and we all settled in for a full night of rest.
That did not happen.
At 2 a.m., the hotel phone starts ringing. Neither of us moves, because it is 2 a.m. and nothing good has ever come from a ringing phone at that hour. We’re just drifting back off when someone starts pounding on the door. W., panicking, answers it. It’s a different front desk clerk than the one who checked us in. Apparently the night clerk was new, and had put us in a room that belonged to someone else, and that someone else had just arrived, in the middle of the night, and could not get into their own room. Which is how we ended up standing in a hallway at 2 a.m. confirming our own existence to a stranger.
We were not off to a great start.
The next morning we grabbed IHOP next door, cleaned up after two cats and a dog, dosed everyone with gabapentin like a very small, very furry pharmaceutical operation, and folded ourselves back into the car. On the way out, I mentioned the 2 a.m. incident to the manager. She apologized, explained the new clerk situation, and that was the entire extent of the make good. My Place Hotel in Midland, Texas: do not recommend, and not just because of the phone call.
Day 2: The Retro Hotel That Redeemed Everything (Mostly)
Nine hours to Tucson, not counting the gas food bathroom trifecta that eats into every road trip day. We rolled in after dark to The Kennedy Hotel, a Best Western property that markets itself as “a Tucson oasis,” and for once, marketing undersold it. The place is genuinely charming: retro inspired, colorful, the kind of boutique hotel that decided being cute and being comfortable weren’t mutually exclusive. They’ve got a little arcade room, a heated pool, and a gym with real NordicTrack equipment, none of which we used, because we had two cats, a geriatric dog, a five-year-old, and the collective energy of people who’d been listening to a British man narrate a decade of children’s literature for two straight days.
The one hiccup: their website swore up and down that pets were welcome, and it turns out that promise had an asterisk, and the asterisk was “except cats.” Lesson learned: always confirm which pets are allowed, because apparently pets are not a monolith to the hospitality industry.
I made W. dig through the roof Jenga tower again because I needed my suitcase and, more specifically, a shower. Breakfast the next morning was uneventful in the best possible way. No complaints. We’d stay there again, cats or no cats.
Day 3: The Border, the Void, and the Speed Bumps of Doom
This was the day the real adventure started.
Five hours from Tucson to Mexicali for the border crossing. In hindsight, we should have stopped there for the night and crossed fresh in the morning, but W. wanted to push through, and I was too tired to argue with momentum. We filled up the tank, parked, and walked into the immigration office to get our temporary residency paperwork stamped. The border agents glanced at our absolute Tetris masterpiece of a car and didn’t bother searching it. No wait inside. The agent wasn’t bilingual, we barely speak Spanish, and somehow we stumbled through the entire process anyway, which felt like a small miracle we did not deserve.
From Mexicali, we picked up Highway 5 heading south, the road that traces the Gulf of California down through San Felipe and the Sea of Cortez desert corridor. If you’ve never driven it, picture vast cactus forests, bleached white desert plains, and impossibly turquoise water showing up out of nowhere like the landscape forgot what color scheme it was supposed to be committing to. It’s remote in a way that feels less like a road trip and more like an expedition, and it was somewhere along here that the car went fully silent except for Harry, Ron, and Hermione, because there was genuinely nothing else out there to look at or listen to.
Eventually Highway 5 dead-ends into Highway 1, the Transpeninsular Highway, the single continuous road that runs the entire 1,000-plus miles down the Baja Peninsula. There isn’t a backup route. There isn’t really an alternate anything. It’s ocean on one side, desert or mountains on the other, and one road connecting all of it, which gives the whole drive a “we are extremely committed now” kind of feeling.
We pushed on toward Hotel Mision in Catavina, which turned out to be the longest, most punishing drive of the entire trip. A note for anyone attempting this route: do not trust Google Maps’ time estimates. It does not know about the two-lane roads, the slower traffic you’ll get stuck behind for miles, the potholes, or the topes, Mexico’s speed bumps, which do not play around and do not believe in warning signs. Sometimes there’s a helpful painted white line before one. Sometimes there’s nothing, and you simply find out the hard way, at speed, with two cats and a very old dog airborne in the back seat.
Somewhere in the middle of all that nothing, we stopped at Taqueria Kassandra, a roadside taco stand that appeared out of the desert with zero warning and zero right to be as good as it was. No town around it that we could see. Just tacos, a folding table, and some of the best food of the entire trip. We didn’t take a single picture, because we were too busy eating.
We arrived at Hotel Mision well after dark, having lost cell signal more times than I could count, despite being promised satellite backup by a company that will remain unnamed but knows who it is. It took a few wrong turns to even find the hotel, tucked behind a wall of cacti like it didn’t want to be found.
And then, it was beautiful. A genuinely stunning remodeled mission, the kind of place I hope we get to go back to under circumstances that don’t involve five cats’ worth of anxiety and a car packed like a crime scene. The kitchen was somehow still open, so we grabbed a late dinner to eat in our room, which had WiFi in theory and not in any way that mattered in practice.
Breakfast the next morning was lovely. Before we left, we asked about gas, and were directed to the only local option: a man selling gasoline out of the back of his truck, by the gallon. We bought enough for three quarters of a tank, downloaded our next map while we still had a signal, and hit the road with the quiet dread of people who know they’re about to lose service again.
Day 4: Two Coastlines, One Broken Promise From Google Maps
Today we got to see both coasts of the peninsula in a single day, which was genuinely spectacular: west along one coastline, then across the middle of the state, then along the Gulf of California on the other side. Somewhere between Catavina and Loreto, we made a second unplanned taco stop at another little roadside stand. I genuinely don’t remember its name, only that it was in the middle of nowhere and it was excellent, which at this point felt less like a coincidence and more like a rule of the road: the emptier the landscape, the better the tacos.
It would have been a perfect day if we hadn’t, once again, trusted Google Maps’ timeline and ended up driving well after dark into Loreto.
We landed in Loreto at Hotel Oasis, a cute little beachy spot that had, delightfully, not mentioned the extra pet fee until we arrived, nor that the “included” all-you-can-eat breakfast required purchasing a separate bracelet. The restaurant was closing as we pulled in, so dinner was takeout, eaten in the room like the road-weary raccoons we had become. But the hotel sat right on the coast, and we walked the beach the next morning before leaving, which almost made up for the bracelet situation. Almost.
Day 5: The Final Day (Or So We Thought)
We continued down Highway 1 toward the very bottom of the peninsula: winding roads, mountains, tiny towns, rough patches, more cacti than I can adequately convey, and zero shoulder on most of it, which matters a great deal when cattle wander onto the road whenever they feel like it, which is often. Somewhere around here, Harry Potter finally defeated Voldemort, which felt like an oddly fitting milestone for how the whole trip had gone. A long, strange journey, several unplanned detours, and a victory that arrived a little later than expected.
As we got closer to Cabo, our landlord called with news: he wasn’t in town to let us into the rental. We’d coordinated an early arrival with him, but somehow landed a full day ahead of schedule anyway. Plan B: a condo in Cabo San Lucas for the night, which I can only describe as architecturally hostile.
We had to park across the street in a dirt field, then haul ourselves, our luggage, two cats, a fifteen-year-old dog, and our own exhausted, sciatic bodies up a steep incline just to reach the building. Both W. and Finn slipped and fell on the way. To actually get to the unit, you walked into the building, took an elevator up, exited onto a platform that also doubled as a rooftop pool deck, walked past said pool, then continued along another steeply inclined sidewalk connecting one building to the next. The stairs inside the condo had no railing and open risers, which meant Finn was banned from them on sight. We ordered Uber Eats for dinner and were genuinely astonished the driver managed to locate us at all, given that our address may as well have been “vertical maze, second cactus on the left.”
Day 6: La Casa
The next morning was a waiting game for our landlord to call back. We walked to a nearby coffee bar, where I had an excellent cup of coffee, and Finn had his first taste of Mexican chocolate milk, which he received with the reverence of a man discovering fire. Checkout came early, so we packed up and headed for our actual new home in San José del Cabo. No landlord, no keys, no plan beyond forward motion. We grabbed a rotisserie chicken and ate it in the car, parked outside our new house, waiting.
And then he showed up, and we were there. Finally, impossibly, there.
No plan, no problem. Mostly.
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