We started in Chula Vista, California, about 10 miles from the San Ysidro border crossing into Tijuana. Over doughnuts and coffee, and punctuated by barks from a large spotted dachshund named Frank, Emery introduced his team, handed out road atlases, and gave us basic instructions on meeting up once we’d cleared the border. The Slow Baja Vintage Expedition entry fee ($3995 at the time of our trip) includes meals, camp-site reservations, evening margaritas, and a local handler to expedite the required travel paperwork. While we waited for the rest of the gang to get their stamps, Fish and I showed off the Ineos to a group of curious border agents, and I got to practice saying, “No, it’s not a Jeep” in Spanish.

My charm didn’t carry us all the way across the border. The National Guard waved us into inspection as the rest of the caravan went through. While the inspector was friendly, it was clear he was concerned about the ownership of the shiny red Ineos, and while Fish tried to explain the concept of a press car through sign language, I searched frantically through my loan agreement for a place where my name and the truck’s name appeared on the same page. Finally, I found the drop-off and return dates, and the officer accepted “rental” as a legitimate reason to be taking it across the border. As we pulled away, the inspector leaned into the window again. “I like it,” he said. “It’s a Jeep?”

As we headed to the initial campsite, Slow Baja had its first and only DNF, when Kurht Gerhardt’s sweet rally-prepped ’67 Porsche 912 had to be towed to camp after its engine expired. It spent the rest of the trip looking photogenic in the barn at Rancho La Bellota, and Gerhardt became navigator for Chris Collard’s ’78 Jeep CJ-7.

Rancho La Bellota sits just far enough off the highway to feel like an oasis, when you finally crest the last steep rise and roll under a tunnel of oak trees to find the ranch house and its surrounding casitas. Owned by Raul Aguiar and Caroline Kane, Rancho La Bellota is a working ranch in the buzzy wine country of Valle de Guadalupe. The couple also rents picturesque guest rooms to visitors interested in horseback riding and winery tours of the surrounding countryside. Aguiar, a third-generation cattleman, built it based on memories of his grandfather’s ranch in the 1940s, with great attention to detail, down to the massive chrome stove in the kitchen, its cooktop covered in cast-iron pans and enamel coffeepots. Electricity is limited to the main house and comes from solar panels hidden behind the barn. Warm-hued LED candles in hanging hurricane lamps re-create a prewired time. Aguiar told me the lamps were originally kerosene, but guests complained about the fumes. “People don’t want to see modern tech,” he said, “but they also don’t want to smell the past.” A desire for experiences that celebrate the pleasure of simplicity without the discomfort of deprivation—that could be a tagline for the Ineos.

That night, around a campfire, we went through the usual topics of automotive enthusiasts: first cars, worst cars, deeply desired cars. Emery has a knack for finding interesting people to come on his tours, and here they ranged from a Duesenberg expert to a paddleboard manufacturer. There was no dearth of adventure stories to tell, as it seemed everyone on the tour had raced Baja or La Carrera Panamericana, or quit an office job to cross the Australian Outback. A lot of adventurers, or maybe, like Fish, just folks who were curious to see what’s out there.

Fish was the star of the show, painting a picture for us of Baja in the early ’70s, when pretty much every path south of Ensenada was dirt. Fish would spend weeks out in the desert finding trails around mountains and sweet-talking landowners into letting 300 cars and motorcycles come flying through their pastures.

“How did you know which way to go?” someone asked. “Oh, Mickey had a plane,” answered Fish. “He’d fly ahead and scout, and then fly back and drop me a handwritten map stuffed in a Coke can. Something like, ‘Go 60 meters and then turn left at the cactus that looks like an elephant.'”

The next morning, we drove through Ensenada, and Fish pointed out where he used to wait for Thompson’s flyover, only the whole cliffside is gone now, dynamited to make room for the multilane pavement of Baja’s Highway 1. Eventually, even the most out-of-the-way places get in the way.

So we kept going, racing ahead of progress, scaling the steep path up the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir mountains to where even the clouds can’t reach. I woke up in the morning to find the world below cloaked in thick blue mist, only a few pine trees poking through. The next day, we slid back down to the sea, dodging tricky silt beds and buried carcasses of less lucky vehicles. “There was a time down here when pretty much all the race cars were Volkswagens,” Fish told me as we rooster-tailed through a wash. “If you broke, you could just kick around on the side of the road, and you’d probably find the bolt or washer you needed.”

When we got to the beach, I finally had a need to lock the Grenadier’s three differentials and play with the airliner-inspired overhead console. Off-road mode on its own is plenty capable for most of these trails, but on the soft sand alongside the Sea of Cortez, we needed both front and rear working together to keep from sinking in.

The Ineos floated across the sand in spite of its 6308-pound mass. It drives better on dirt than on pavement—the steering quirks that make it feel sloppy on the street become stable and predictable when the ground is not. For 2026, Ineos addressed some of the on-road steering foibles without sacrificing the Grenadier’s off-road pedigree.

The Quartermaster’s reliable workhorse of an engine, a BMW-sourced turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six, meant it quickly became a pack mule for items too heavy for other trucks. By day three, I was carrying a cooler, several chairs, and 16 bags of dog food bound for the Baja Animal Outreach dog shelter. The truck never even noticed the cargo, but the dogs were appreciative. We left lighter by 800 pounds and heavier by one cream-colored puppy, adopted by Maysie Jukes, who was on the trip with her dad, Mark, in a ’61 Jeep FC-170.

We moved down the peninsula, our caravan undulating like the rattlesnakes that watched us from shaded hollows. There were minor mechanical issues and miscalculations on fuel economy, but any time there was a problem, someone was ready to assist with a wrench or a tow rope. “I never brought any tools,” Fish told me. “I didn’t want the Volkswagen to know it had the option to fail.”

We ate freshly shucked oysters in the Punta Mazo Nature Reserve and watched the waves crash on the shore like fallen moonlight. In Cataviña, where the cacti and boulders compete to touch the sky, we experienced the positive side of technology when the Felds set up a portable theater and we streamed Dust to Glory, the famous Dana Brown Baja documentary, surrounded by the same landscape Ivan Stewart and Mike “Mouse” McCoy bomb through in the film. The next night, we were back at the ocean, drinking from coconuts, leaning against Joss Lumens’s ’82 Datsun pickup, and eating empanadas out of the Grenadier’s center console. If you’d offered any of us a ride back to civilization at that moment, we’d have told you to get lost.

Elana Scherr

Senior Editor, Features

Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story “A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2.”  In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story “In Washington, D.C.’s Secret Carpool Cabal, It’s a Daily Slug Fest” was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
 

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