I'M SURPRISED THERE'S NOT a video game called Mex 1. You get the sense that engineers simply measured two trucks and built the highway at exactly that width. There are bumps that shake your vehicle with the ferocity of a head-on collision. Cars pass closely enough that you could reach inside and change their radio station. In the mountain passes, the highway plunges into turns so severe they should probably be labeled "corners" instead; looking off the edge, you see the rusted bodies of cars that didn't make it.

But the highway is as eager to help as to hurt. On the fifth day of the trip, the morning after the scorpion ascended my leg, I woke up with a pounding headache and looked out the flap of my tent to see a collection of pelicans and seagulls gathered around the carcasses of grouper and snapper that we'd filleted the night before. There was a neat pile of squashed beer cans next to the fire pit, and the ground was littered with the shells of oysters that we'd peeled off the underwater roots of mangrove trees. The disheveled campsite reminded me of the dead battery, so I pulled on my clothes and started walking west toward Mex 1.

On my way I cut across some fresh coyote tracks and the slithery trail of a snake in the sand. When I finally made it out to a road, I started walking north toward Mulegé, a gringo-friendly seaside oasis about seven miles distant. I'd gone about a mile when I saw a guy messing with a collection of partially dismantled trucks outside a garage. I walked up and said, "Hola," which pretty much exhausted my Spanish. I opened my notebook and began plotting a sketch. I was imagining a beach scene, featuring an unhappy traveler pointing under a van's open hood. I was wishing for an easel when a brilliant coincidence occurred. The guy pulled out a set of jumper cables and clicked the connectors to the battery terminals in one of the dismantled trucks. I ran over, pointing and gesturing. The excitement stirred some distant memories of forgotten Spanish and I blurted out, "Yo también... muerto... en la playa." A half-hour later, I was backslapping our new buddy Ramón as he jumped the marooned rental back to life.

We got lucky like that again and again. Things just worked out magically, without a plan, from beach to beach and town to town. We rolled into Loreto, an up-and-coming hot spot for watersports, and discovered what might just be the peninsula's best fish taco, at a place called Mc. Lulu's. The fish was crispy, the tortillas were fresh, the cabbage and onions had bite. Farther down the road we drove into the bustling city of La Paz. It was close to ten at night and we had no reservations, but we pulled up to the nicest waterfront hotel we could find, Hotel Perla, and walked in unannounced. I thanked the Tijuana crime wave when we scored two side-by-side third-floor rooms with a view for a hundred bucks apiece.

Our last morning came all too soon. We woke up along the Sea of Cortez near the tip of the peninsula, where we'd stretched out our bags on a white-sand beach. I'd snorkeled the shoreline the evening before, then we'd sat in camp and watched dozens of rays leaping out of the water as we grilled a clown hawkfish and a red snapper and shucked a new batch of oysters. When we pulled onto Mex 1, I scraped the length of the rental's underside across the lip of the road. "Almost bottomed out," I said.

We made good time in the light traffic of early morning, and it was looking like we'd make it to the Los Cabos airport early. Each mile of the highway was painful now, the odometer like some evil-minded clock counting down to the end of our fun. I wanted to find some way to stop its progress when the road did it for us. Matt was just starting to let out a few of his "Boring!" moans when we rounded a bend to see a massive line of parked trucks blocking the road. A policeman walked up and explained in broken English that there was a wreck ahead and we'd have to take an almost 200-mile detour. I swung the rental around, thinking that fate had decided to keep me in Baja after all, but then Danny found a faint squiggly line on an atlas and said, "Check this out. Looks like it comes back to the highway a few bends past that crash."

We took a wrong turn and ended up in a washed-out arroyo. I did a 16-point turnaround and we got back on the right track, the rental taking on yet another coat of dust. After some ten miles of washboard roads, we were spit back onto Mex 1 with a horrendous scraping noise. The detour was invigorating, just one more thing that couldn't be planned, and I gunned the van toward the airport.

I was relieved when the guy at the rental agency didn't even investigate the minivan. I still had that tingly feeling from the highway in the backs of my legs when I took my seat on the airplane. A woman in the seat next to me asked what I'd been doing in Baja. I told her I hadn't really done anything, but that it had gone really well.