CABO SAN LUCAS, Mexico — There is a legend here that the Hotel California that the Eagles sang about all those years ago is located on the Baja Peninsula, and that it was where Don Henley and Glen Frey wrote their greatest hit. Since we helped make it their greatest hit, tracking down the famous hotel was a logical pursuit when the Celebrity Millennium dropped anchor yesterday morning.
A quick check on the Internet located the address, the corner of Calle Juarez and Morello. Neither street showed up on the Cabo San Lucas handi-map we took off the ship, but there was such a location on the map of San Jose del Cabo, 20 miles away. Since one of us is gender-challenged — he never asks for directions — this was a simple matter of finding the right bus, since Cabo cabs are known to be unnecessarily expensive.
After changing $20 into pesos, at the bus stop we met a local who spoke “poquito” English. 
He gave us directions for “downtown San Jose”, we each paid the $2.50 fare (25 pesos) and settled in for the estimated 60-minute ride. It was through countryside we’ve never before seen, as pretty as any in Mexico, with long stretches of beaches between burgeoning hotels and condo resorts. There is plenty of undeveloped land, or sand, although less than there once was and less than there is going to be.
Except for the ocean, the landscape is not unlike Arizona, and cactus growing in the sand close to the water is what you might call a foreign juxtaposition. There are many golf courses and of the beachside resorts, the Westin looks the most magnificent from the highway, carved out of or built into a cliff.
It wasn’t the Eagles, but the bus fare came with entertainment — two caballeros playing acoustic guitars and singing something that was not Hotel California. 
Live music was a cut above the bus ride we had in Acapulco, where the driver picks the head-banging music CDs he plays at boom-box volume, start to finish.
“I’m really glad we did this,” said the one not gender-challenged.
And then things took a bad turn, when the driver didn’t take the one we were expecting, into “Centro” San Jose. By the time another passenger helped us figure out where we were, Centro was in the past, requiring a trip on the really local bus, bouncing over speed bumps toward downtown. When everyone else got off, so did we, Centro or not. The map verified we were in the right area, mere blocks from Juarez and Morello.
Poverty surrounded us. The restaurants were small and scattered. The streets unkept, at best. Somehow, it’s hard to imagine the Eagles’ being inspired here. Were they on drugs? Okay, don’t answer that.
Finally, the corner of Juarez and Morello. The hotel must have moved. The only building resembling a hotel or restaurant was something called Pinguin, with refreshments in an old chest freezer without a lid. No dark desert highway. No mirrors on the ceiling. No pink champagne on ice. There were “prisoners here of our own device” — unwilling to admit we had made all those wrong turns.
Clearly, there was a Juarez and Morello intersection in Cabo San Lucas, and we had spent three hours looking in the wrong location, San Jose. After the bus ride back, the gender-challenged instigator of this wild goose chase went into a store and miraculously asked for directions to the Hotel California.
“Oh, it’s not here,” the young man said. “It’s in San Jose.”
Well, at least now we know the way….to San Jose.
An hour later, a waiter in a Cabo San Lucas restaurant, Margaritavilla, told us that the real Hotel California is in the opposite direction in a town called Los Santos. For another trip. However, that’s probably the place where “you can check out but you can never leave.”
That’s it, we’re done.