These are people who are used to giving away more of themselves to connect with others in unfamiliar surroundings. This isn't like meeting people in a bar or on the adjacent Stairmaster. And this, I now suspect, is the reason most of us have come. Since Baja receives one to two inches of rain per year, Green Tortoise has not bothered to assemble solid rain structures. We discover this during our first night, when a downpour begins at 4 a.m.
People scramble to collect their bags and wedge into the tiny bus that has delivered the packs.
We're now trying to rest on plywood in damp sleeping bags with knees pressed into a neighbor's back, but almost everyone keeps laughing. Kent explains that rain hoods usually extend off the buses for cooking or sleeping, but because it was the first trip of the season, they aren't in place yet. After our days in the sun, the bus begins its northward journey. The rest of the ride back through the Central Valley of California is spacious, rainy and somber. A few people sleep sprawled in the new spaces, and others form a circle around the mini-tiles of a travel Scrabble board.