The cruisers' net in San Carlos had started. Since we had arrived that morning, I wanted to check in and find out what was happening. Among the other information, they said that sun set was at 7:04 pm. "Wow!" I said. "Seems like just yesterday the sun set around 8 pm." I wrote it off to time flying by when we were having fun.

Sean and I went to the marina office to check in. The lady that did the paperwork was on vacation for a week or two, so the older man that had greeted us when we arrived asked that we go to our assigned slip and come back later when he had had the time to try to figure out what he needed to do. It took him quite a while to find our slip reservation, which scared us a bit as both marinas in San Carlos are completely full for larger boats like ours.

The check in process involved giving the man some of our boat paperwork to photocopy, but he then stopped the process and asked that we wait until the lady came back from vacation to do anything else, including paying. I don't think they have much cross-training here. I could feel my mind working on the sun set discrepancy, but couldn't grasp anything because I'd only had two 2-hour blocks of sleep the night before because of doing watches as we crossed the Sea of Cortez.

We found out that there is a free shuttle to the town of San Carlos, about 5 miles away, so we went to explore the town while Tara and Casey vegg'ed-out on the boat. The town is spread out along the highway for at least a mile, making it difficult to walk in the 100-degree heat to the various stores and restaurants.

Since we were the only people being transported, we asked the Spanish-only speaking driver to show us where the Mercado (grocery store) and a few restaurants were. After giving us a quick looking over to see what type of establishment we would most appreciate (cheap versus expensive), he dropped us off at a gringo-looking, inexpensive restaurant called Jax Snax and agreed to pick us up at the Mercado four hours later. We gave him a 20-peso tip and walked into the Jax Snax.

Our driver had picked the perfect place for us. We had been out at the islands for 3 weeks with only the food we had on our boat. Usually it only takes two weeks away from a grocery store or restaurant before we start talking like the people on Survivor. It always starts with, "I could really go for a (insert a descriptor like ice cold or big and juicy) (insert-your-favorite-food-here)." This always starts a long conversation with full participation from everyone on board. We could all feel ourselves dwindling away to nothing. Our first order of business when arriving in a town is to visit the Mercado and a restaurant or two.

Jax Snax had a wide-ranging junk-food menu, from pizza to hamburgers to malts. Sean and I split chicken fajitas, two diet cokes (with ice!) and a chocolate milkshake. We were in heaven. We met a couple of fellow Americans there and had good conversation. One older man was by himself, eating a hamburger. I asked if it was good and noted that we still haven't had a good hamburger in Mexico. He said it was very good and I made a mental note to order one next time. It was difficult to process this mental note because my mind was crunching on the sunset problem. That's when the break-through happened. I asked what time it was and I found that my watch was off by one hour. Readers of our blog may remember that it took us from Ensenada to Cabo San Lucas to figure out that there was a 1-hour time difference from Pacific Standard Time. But evidentially, there is a 2-hour time difference here in San Carlos. Therefore, I concluded, the sun isn't really setting one hour sooner here. I just didn't have the correct local time!

We went to a few touristy stores and then still had time to kill, so went to Froggy's, a place I'd heard about on the cruiser's net that had 2 for the price of 1 pizzas. Since we weren't hungry, we ordered two cervesa and sat in their very hot outdoor patio because the cool inside had a lot of smokers. We were joined by two white kittens and mommy cat. Sean reached down to pet them, but stopped after remembering a story about another cruiser family that ended up shaving their heads to get rid of flees they had gotten from petting a street cat. I looked down at the scrawny animals and could easily see 50 black flees on each white cat. Even though they didn't rub against us, we both thought we could feel the infestation starting on our bare legs.

The Mercado was small, but had what we needed. We spent 890 pesos (about 89 dollars) and decided we had probably bought too much because we're coming back to the States soon. Marina water isn't clean enough to swim in and it's really hot and humid, so it's miserable to stay on our boat while we're docked. We're trying to leave for the states in a few days and spend some time at the Grand Canyon before the girls fly home from Tucson on August 21st. Sean and I will follow some time later after doing some boat repairs. We plan to be in the US until early October.