IF YOU HAD ASKED ME A FEW WEEKS AGO WHAT I WOULD DO IF A SCORPION CRAWLED UP MY FOOT, I would have told you that I'd move slowly so as not to agitate the little critter, then deposit it gently a safe distance away from camp. However, we humans do not always come as advertised. When actually presented with the situation, while eating a makeshift fish taco on a deserted beach along Mexico's Baja Peninsula, I emitted a shrill cry before jumping up and down and thrusting my foot into the flames of a driftwood campfire.

The scorpion vanished with a slight crackle, leaving me to explain to my buddies that I hadn't actually panicked—it was more like I'd implemented a swift form of frontier justice. They weren't buying my story, so I attempted to reestablish my tough-guy credentials by blowing a few fireballs of Cuban rum. This might have worked better if Danny hadn't wandered over to our abused rental van and announced that I'd left the ignition on again and this time the battery was completely dead.

My "buddies" amounted to my two older brothers—Matt, 37, a U.S. Department of Agriculture grassland ecologist from Miles City, Montana, and Danny, 35, an aquatic ecologist with the University of Alaska at Anchorage—and my longtime friend Andrew Radzialowski, a.k.a. Pooter, a 33-year-old chef currently working in Savannah, Georgia. The four of us were once world-class wanderers, equipped with weeks to spare but little cash; now that we're all professionals, with less time and more money, we try to pack our outings into small, highly structured slots. One day I realized that we spend more days plotting our trips than taking them, and it made me think that we'd lost our adventurous edge, that we were no longer willing to do something that basically amounts to nothing. While we'd come to Mexico on a mission—to spend the week living the perfect Baja lifestyle while driving the peninsula's length, from Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas—we wanted to do it without any concrete plans, obligations, reservations, or ideas about where we'd spend the night. In Tijuana we'd rented a spotless white minivan that would soon regret the day we came into its life and filled it with tents, sleeping bags, fishing rods, snorkeling gear, and coolers.

So far, the journey had gone almost perfectly, but as I stared under the hood I felt as though I'd messed up the one ingredient that a road trip can't do without. However, we certainly hadn't planned on getting stranded in the desert, so one could argue that everything was still going exactly as planned. It was convoluted logic, but it allowed me to go back over to the fire, crack another beer, and jump into a rather heated debate about which of those impossibly bright stars formed Orion's belt. By the time the argument segued into a fight about who'd had the craziest girlfriend, I'd completely forgotten about our predicament.