Although a lot has happened since last I blurbed from Bahia Los Frailes, and I do intend to fill in some of those blanks, I want to skip ahead and start with now.

Right now, we're sitting on the little stone terrace of an adorable casita at the Ventana Bay Resort in La Ventana, Baja California, munching on sourdough pretzel nibbles and sipping cold filtered water. We're surrounded by palm trees that make whooshing noises in the gusty breeze, while a little bird peep peep's somewhere nearby, but otherwise, it's peaceful and quiet.

We're taking a vacation from our vacation. We rented a car in La Paz yesterday and drove the 45-minutes east to spend a little time with friends John and Lisa, who've been coming to La Ventana from the Pacific Northwest for many decades to play with the wind. There's a lot of wind here, and the people who make up crazy and dangerous ways to use that wind are all here: the windsurfers, kite boarders, kite foilers, wing foilers. It's a mecca of windy, watery sports. A thing about sports: whenever one gets particularly saturated, as in, everybody's doing it, someone comes up with a new one. And so it is with wind sports. Most windsurfers abandoned their clumsy big sails and booms 10-20 years ago in favor of kite boarding, an elegant sport with smaller boards and pretty parachute-like arced sails and lots of scary strings, which was suddenly way cooler. Then, along came kite foiling, where the board lifts up on skinny little foils and flies above the water. Next, wing foiling, with bat-wing shaped inflated sail-things that you hang onto with handles, no strings attached. Then the windsurfers started foiling their windsurfers, and some of the wing foilers abandoned the wing for just an electric powered foil, but none of them are here. This place is about wind.

So Allan, a former windsurfer, came with 3 used kites he got from a friend, a board he got from John, a harness he got from me - ready to get back on the water. He'd taken a few lessons about 9 years ago but needed a refresher, so here we are in one of the top wind meccas of the West. John and Lisa hooked Allan up with an instructor, Rodrigo, and they spent yesterday playing with the kite on the beach, just to get back into some of the moves. Today the water part happened.

Now, in my opinion, anything that has a training move called "body dragging" is suspect. Why would you want to actually choose to do that? But body dragging is part of the training, and Allan's body was dragged all through the wet, choppy water today while he managed the kite way high up above him, then sometimes way downwind of him, yanking him along, while Rodrigo coached him from the beach via instructions piped into his helmet. Next, Rodrigo added the board for some board body dragging. Then, after I was exhausted watching, not to mention a bit sandblasted, he attempted to get up and actually kite board. I figured by then, if was me, I'd just body drag myself all the way down the beach until I washed ashore and somebody brought me a spicy margarita, but he's feistier than I when it comes to water sports, and he stuck it out.

Apparently he did get up on the board, which is fabulous - but I missed it because he actually was halfway down the beach toward the spicy margarita place, and I couldn't keep up. So I went back to my sand-blasting spot on the beach and snuggled into the 10 square meter sail they had chosen not to use today, trying to forget that I had to pee. After awhile I started to worry - it's a genetic thing for women, I think - imagining him exhausted and water-logged and hoping none of the other 200 kiteboardfoilwingwindsurfers ran over him. But eventually, I saw him and Rodrigo walking up the beach, and I relaxed.

Rodrigo packed up his stuff and went south, we packed up our stuff and went north, hiked up to our little casita to rinse off all the gear and relax a bit. As we debriefed the day, Allan came to a big conclusion about this kite boarding thing: not gonna do it! Phew! You might say - good thing! Skip that dangerous body-dragging sport and stick to yoga! But no. Instead, he wants to try wing foiling - it's much easier to do from a boat and doesn't have any scary strings. In the meantime, it's almost time to join John and Lisa for those spicy margaritas.