Tentative Itinerary

Amanda and I have been gathering supplies and packing for most of the weekend. We spent a lot of time yesterday making sure we had several copies of all the important papers we would be bringing into Mexico. We have a folder for all of these papers, along with a notebook for keeping track of our spending, and another for recording all of the field data. Getting all of these things organized has taken a fair amount of time. The other supplies took relatively little time to gather. We picked up a few necessities at Jax, but we're traveling light enough to get everything into one duffel bag and one backpack a piece, plus a cooler to hold some research supplies. A few shirts, two pairs of pants, four pairs of socks and underwear are all the clothing that I will bring for the six weeks. This sounds sparse, but it should be plenty. Clothing washed in a hotel sink takes very little time to dry in the Baja air.

We'll be staying in hotels the majority of the time. The exception will be in the northern most sites (possibly only one of them). When we're not in hotels, we'll be in the back of the truck.

Our flight takes off from Des Moines at 7:04 a.m. this Friday the seventh. We have a quick layover in Houston, and we'll be in San Jose del Cabo a little after noon. The tentative plan is to pick up a rental vehicle for Adam, who is staying with us until the 18th of May, and use it to get around while we make sure that the pickup truck is in good working order. The pickup is located a few miles away from the airport, and we hope it will be ready to go a few hours after we get off the plane. From San Jose del Cabo, we'll drive a short distance to Los Cabos (indicated by the southernmost dot on the map) and check into a hotel. A small site just west of the city is our first stop in the field.

My hope is to spend about three days at each site. Six weeks should be more than enough time for this when including travel time, but I planned for a longer trip in case the fig fruits we're looking for are not in the phase when wasps are fully developed inside of them (more on this later). On our first day at Los Cabos, we will put up a sticky trap on a single branch from every tree we sample. We'll try to collect about 20 fig fruits from five separate fig trees. And we'll leave the traps up for a 48 hour period (possibly 24, depending on how they look) during which we'll process the collected fig fruits (details on this later). Two to three days at a site should leave me plenty of time to keep things organized, and give Amanda some time to paint when we're not processing samples.

Around the eleventh we'll head north to La Paz (image to the right), a city in which I've visited twice in my graduate student career. Outside this city is one of the largest fig sites from which we've sampled in Baja. We'll collect from this site, and also have Adam help us learn how to obtain a phytosanitary certificate, which we'll will need to import fig seeds into the United States. We also should have time to meet up with an old friend studying in La Paz. All of this should take us to the 14th of May, at which point Adam will either head back home, or come with us to one more site in Loreto.

After sampling in Loreto for a few days, Adam will definitely need to be back in San Jose del Cabo by the 18th to head home. Amanda and I will be on our own from then on out, traveling to Santa Rosalia. We'll sample there until about the 21st, then drive to Guerrero Negro. There are two sites near Guerrero Negro from which we will sample; the first site is less than 100 miles away. We'll probably plan on spending time there until the 25th. The sixth and northernmost site is several hundred miles north of Guerrero Negro, and we'll need to camp out in the truck for several days to get fig fruits from this site. I hope to have us back in Guerrero Negro on the 31st, then headed south again by the first of June. This will leave us with over two weeks to pick up any samples we may need in the five southernmost sites, and get the phytosanitary certificate in La Paz. We'll fly back into Houston on the 17th of June.

Our schedule is very tentative, but we hope to be able to collect data from all six sites and not strain ourselves too much. We'll keep updating at various points along the way.