Border Crossing

What a border crossing it was! We diddled around Laredo on Wednesday and arrived at the bus terminal with time to kill. The bus people loaded all our suitcases into the bottom storage compartment underneath the seating area of the bus while Doris and I sat inside the waiting room and John and Johnny guarded our luggage outside. We then climbed aboard the Autobuses Americanos first class bus at 5:00PM and headed to Mexico! Five minutes into the ride the Mexican border crossing guys get on the bus and want to see passports. There are maybe eight Americans on the bus, so we all get off the bus and head into the little house. There's a guy sitting at a little desk writing out tourist visas and getting the information off our passports. We each get a piece of paper that we are to take to the bank in San Miguel and pay for.

Back on the bus and we go for maybe five more minutes and the bus pulls off into a side area. Everybody off the bus with our carryon stuff and all our luggage is unloaded from underneath. We gather all our bags and stuff and trudge into a customs building where we pile everything on a conveyor belt and it all goes through the X-ray machine. The German Shepherd is in a cage in the corner. At this point we wish our Spanish was a little more than "Dos Margaritas" because everyone is yelling in Spanish and we're asking a co-rider for translations. We get all our stuff off the belt and drag it through a checkpoint where you push the button on the random search light. If it's green, you pass through and if it flashes red, you get searched. No one got the red light, so we all get back on the bus and head deeper into Mexico.

We settle into our seats and they don't recline quite enough and there's only a tiny little footrest. The ride is bumpy and the road is a washboard and we have Dale Earnhardt for a driver. The movie starts on the tiny TVs and the speakers are shrill and tinny and blast a Spanish movie over the load speakers. They are not Bose. This bus is NOT up to the standards of many first class Mexican buses and now we know why our ticket was only $50.

We stop in Monterrey and we all get off to take a bathroom break. The boy is sitting at the restroom entrance to collect the 30 peso fee for using the facility, and of course we have no pesos, so scramble around to get some. If you missed the roll of toilet paper OUTSIDE the rest room and didn't grab some, you're out of luck inside unless you happen to have a roll stashed in your backpack. Ah, sometimes we forget how spoiled we've become as Americans.

We make several more stops on the bus throughout the night to gas up, pay tolls and use more wonderful restroom facilities. Our bus driver is passing EVERYONE on the road. We have never seen so many 18-wheelers, cement trucks, flatbed trucks and huge buses. There are very few "normal" cars. The traffic starts to thin a bit the further south we go, and eventually we get on a two lane road and our driver is still going for the checkered flag.

We arrive in San Miguel almost 2 hours EARLY at 5:10AM. There are naturally no taxi cabs at the bus terminal. We call our hosts at La Casa Arriba in San Miguel and roust them out of bed to tell them we have arrived. They are of course delighted we have arrived so early! We are very happy to have arrived safe and sound and glad our latest adventure is behind us.