At last, here is the long awaited conclusion of my three-day weekend. It only took me the whole week to get to it...
First of all, let me say that I really like Mexico, but I never wanted to drive over there. It scares me that all of the signs are in Spanish and there are often no lines on the roads or indications of one-way streets. Or maybe there are indications, but I just can't read them. Either way, I wasn't planning on driving into TJ on Saturday.
As my bad luck would have it, we somehow missed the turn to park before the border. I was expecting some kind of exit, but the only way to avoid crossing the border was a turnaround from the left lane marked with a very small sign. So I was just driving south looking for a place to park when all of the sudden everything was in Spanish. I said to Ryan, "I think we accidentally went into Mexico." He said, "No way, we would have had to stop at the border or something."
But there we were, and so the adventure began. Lets just say it's a lot easier to get into Mexico than to get out. Of course I knew that from living in Brownsville for two years, but we always just walked across and rarely had to deal with waiting in lines.
It was quite a process to find the right line to get back to the US. First we got into what we thought was the line (we were following arrows that said U.S.A.). It turns out that was a special bus line and the nice Officer made us get out of it. We tried to follow his directions to the right place but somehow ended up and a freeway going to who knows where. After a bit of effort we finally managed to turn around and get in the correct line, only to wait for another two hours before making it back to the good ol' US of A.
Here are a few pictures to document all of the fun:
I told Ryan not to antagonize the nice officer, but all he did was laugh at him. This guy doesn't look amused...
It's just like Disneyland, except there's no fastpass and everyone looks like they want to hurt me.
As we were waiting in line Ryan did his first good deed for the day by helping this guy push his car back to the US. The second good deed came a few minutes later when he let some other people borrow his phone after they had run out of gas.
As you can see it was a most eventful day. After that we drove back to LA and took it easy on Monday. We went down to Hollywood and Highland to see the obligatory sights. Then it was back to my apartment for a little cookout.
That's about it. Ryan, thanks for visiting! To anyone else in the audience: If you fly out to Cali for a visit, you too could end up here on holden-corbett.com....
-chc
