Saturday July 18th, 2009

Howdie Ho Neighbours.

You would think that just one day we could not have any troubles....I will start with last night. Ross woke me up at about 1:30 am to inform me that half the bus is without power! Well...............we looked in the manual and there is an optional box located above the door that will probably manage the power, but no, we did not have it. We stayed awake a bit longer and realized that we could do nothing until the morning. The only roof air we had was in the living room and no power anywhere else. I had mentioned that maybe we blew a breaker and then I thought that maybe the heat did something and when it cooled off everything would work again. We fell off onto a worried sleep and I woke up about 4am watching the sun rise wondering when to wake Ross to see if the Genset would work again, afraid that when we tried it wouldn’t! Well I woke him up at about 6am but it was way too early. We woke again at 8 and checked the genset and one of the breakers had popped because we put too much strain on the system, and it was too hot. When we had the new air conditioner plugged in the last time we were on the Circus Circus power supply.

So, we showered at the park and took off to Wally world to pick up a few supplies we need before we entered Mexico.

We got to the border and it seemed our paperwork was in order but they wanted $350.00 for the fees. We didn’t have it in cash and they would not take a credit card. The border guard and I went to the US border in his car so I could walk across the border to an ATM to get the money. Once at the border I realized that I had forgotten my passport, and the US border guard would not let me through. So we waited at the border for about ½ hour for our paperwork to be completed on their end and got back to Betsy. I then had 1 hour to drive to the US border, go across, get $350.00 and come back because the border closes at 2pm on Friday’s. So off I drive to the US border, get into the slowest lane to cross, got to the guard and he spend 10 minutes with me, after me telling him I only had a half an hour to get to the Mexican border to cross. Heh (sorry I needed to breathe)..............I drove about a mile to the first ATM and it was not working (it’s a good think I forgot my passport cause I would never have made the trek on foot), so I drove a little bit more and the next place the ATM was down, ok so not to bore you, after going to 4 more ATM’s (including a motel) I ended up back in Nogales at the Chase Manhattan bank to withdraw the money. Once I parked there was 3 people ahead of me, I very nicely asked if I could but in line and she said si, I love the Mexicans! Back to the border I go, I think I got up to 160 Km up the hill to the Mexican customs, which closed 8 minutes ago, to make a long story short, we finally met up, gave David his $350.00 and took off to get out vehicle permits at 21 Km station.

We waited in line for our FM3’s to be stamped and waited in another line to get our permit. While I stood in line Ross had to get all our papers copied for their files. We got to the ticket window and found out that they did not like the fax copy of the registration for the car so I had to go to the office to have them approve it. After showing him the original insurance card he signed off on it and I needed to get a copy of it. Back to the permit window I go, Ross is now done and I wait for my vehicle permit. All is in order so guess what.................we left.

We drove about 150 kms and we had to stop for a bunch of guys with machine guns wanting to know what we had in our car and trailer. They looked in the RV and wanted to look into the trailer. Just to let you know that they took some bolt cutters to the fastener that customs had put on the trailer to look inside. Once they looked, their mouths dropped open and they didn’t know what to do, it was so packed. In the mean time they checked out the car, had me open the trunk and asked how much money my vacuum cleaner was worth (we are storing it in, of course, the trunk of the car) and how much was the box that we had in the trunk also (it had the power conditioner/regulator in it), I told him 200.00 for the vacuum and 100.00 for what was in the box. He seemed ok with this. In the mean time, they were commenting on Ross’s shoes, (they liked them). So suffice it to say we passed the inspection. (Ross and I talked about this tonight and figured that they were looking for drug runners and they were really looking out for us so we were not upset in the least (since we didn’t have any drugs on us)

After this it was clear sailing, there are several toll roads we are taking they are asking for 19.00 pesos for one and 65.00 for the second one. There were also several topes (speed bumps) where if you go faster than 5 kms you will shake the car or in our case the RV to shreds, so you go very slow through some of the towns along the way, sometimes 3 topes per town. While you are almost stopped going through the topas they try to sell you nuts and stuff. You just shake your head no and they go onto the next car.

The rest of the trip went uneventful, except for when we got to Hermosillo, Mx (Which is the capital of the state of Senora) (1/2 million people) we tried to get an RV spot at this one place but there weren’t any showers or anything so we decided we would rent a room at a motel, park in the parking lot and use the shower in the morning. We stopped at the Holiday Inn but they wouldn’t let us park the motor home so we went across the street and we are staying at a wonderful motel, with a wonderful restaurant (where the people actually spoke English). While Ross was backing up to park in the lot we hit a tree with the motor home, put a small dent in the top, but got parked. Here we sit right now. I had enchiladas for supper and Ross had a BLT. We are trying to get comfy and have a really good sleep tonight so we can travel farther into Mexico going to our Casa in Bucerias!

I don’t know how much sleep we will have as we are parked right alongside the highway!

We are so excited on what is going to happen tomorrow, stay tuned!

A very tired
Ross and Kim
Ps the animals are doing great! (another story in that, but too tired to explain!)