Off Road Fun

Helmet Cam

I’ve been looking into buying a helmet cam so I can get some cool footage on the web site but I haven’t been able to decide which one to get. When it comes to consumer grade cameras I noticed the prices vary from $50 up to as much as $200. I’ve never used any of these so I’ll have to base my decision on any reviews I can find online. So far I’m leaning towards the OREGON SCIENTIFIC ATC 2K. The video quality isn’t worth writing home about but for under 100 dollars you get a small waterproof camcorder. You can find some footage on YOUTUBE by doing a search on GOOGLE. As you can see from the available footage, the frames are a bit shakey & the audio isn’t too good either but that’s ok. I plan on editing out the sound and using music for my vidoes. I’ve included a few links below in case you’ve thought about getting a sport camcorder too. If you already have one, please use the comments to tell me about yours.

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Big Red Buggy

Here’s some pictures of the 4 seat buggy available from GLOBALGOODZ.COM

This one is 800cc with EFI. These things are very inexpensive too, This one is only about $7,000 from GLOBAL GOODZ. This thing is fast & fun. We loaded it up with about 900 lbs of people weight and we were easily doing 50mph down the short strip of road we were testing it on.  This is one of the off road vehicles we’ll be taking with us to Ensenada for the BAJA trip. What’s cool is that in Mexico you can drive these on the street with no problems. I live in California so it can only be registered as an off-road vehicle but in other states these can be registered for on road use. They have everything a car would have like headlights, tail lights, and turn signals.

Pro Truck link

In the spirit of the BAJA 1000, here is a link to the Ivan Stewart pro truck series website.

The Rental House

We’ve secured the house we chose to rent. It’s right on the beach on a penninsula. It should be nice and quiet. Here’s a photo I pulled from the website that it’s listed on. We got lucky and picked a house owned by someone who lives nearby so leaving a deposit was much easier than the San Felipe rental.

Baja 1000: Ensenada hotels are sold out!!

Hello all. Just an update….

After extensive research, it appears almost all the hotels in Ensenada are booked for the Baja1000 days. From the fine hotels down to the roach motels. Apparently, most were booked since last year. I never would have expected Ensenada to be so populated for the Baja1000. Our next option was to rent a condo or house. Since there are a bunch of us going, the cost is actually comparable to a decent hotel (even though they are charging holiday rates). We’ve found & booked a house already. It was all done on the internet. It was fairly easy to find one and there are still a few available but if you plan on going, you better not wait too long.

Baja quick tip:Don’t automaticaly pay full price

One thing to remember when in Mexico is that the vendors are used to dealing with tourists. They want to sell us a bunch of souvineers for the highest price possible. They know we are there to spend money so they’ll start the sale price as high as they can. In many cases you can haggle. Obviously this wont work at the corporate chain stores but if you’re looking for shirts, hats, mugs, shot glasses, or some other souvineer you can get these from any one of the many independant vendors. There are so many vendors selling the same junk that the buyer can usually get them to reduce the price. What you’ll also find is that many of the street vendors are just “agents” selling some central business owners merchandise. Basically a very small number of independant owners (many cases americans) control the majority of the local market. They just hire the locals to sell their stuff either on salary or comission only. They open many stands & stores and send dozens of people on foot to sell their product. If it’s on commission, they don’t have to worry about how many locals they “hire” since they only pay them if they sell product.  If the street vendor looks desperate or a hard luck case, they will usually take less money for stuff since some commision is better than no commission at all.

2007 Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 Schedule