May 23rd, 2009
We didn’t get the van last night like we expected. But the mechanic worked on getting the plates until after 8:00 pm. Then he told us to call back at 10:00 in the morning.
May 24th
We called at 10 but there was no answer. We tried again at 11 with the same results. But at 11:30 he answered and said he had been running down the plates. He usually hires someone to do this, but it didn’t get done soon enough, so he did it himself. What kind of Mexican is this? The van is ready, license plates and all.
We called a cab. The fellow was off today but he came and picked us up anyway. He brought his wife with him. We got the car and headed back to the boat. We decided to try to pack and leave tonight. That was going to take some doing.
I packed things in plastic bags because that is all we had to work with. I put them into a bucket and lowered them over the edge of the boat, (about 13 feet since the boat was on the hard) and down to Jim who put them into the van. We both worked as hard as we could. Then Jim came up and started lowering things down or carrying them down the latter. There was a boy there who wanted to help. He took things to the van and loaded it. It was working like an assembly line. I would pack things and put them into bags. Jim would get them off the boat and Hector would take them to the truck.
When we were almost done, I sent down our best clothes which were hanging in the closet and ask Jim to set them on top of everything else. There were still some things to be put into the van but we were almost done. When I finished, I went down and sat on a chair to recoop for a break while Jim and Hector finished.
Then, when they were done, I saw the loading that Hector had done for us. I was so upset that I couldn’t look into the back of the van. The clothes had things stacked over them, including a 5 gallon bottle of water. Potato chips and cookies were on the bottom and things were just thrown wherever they landed. But we were ready to go. We got into the van and away we went. Things would have to be straightened out when we stopped somewhere. Meanwhile, I would just pretend it was done right.
Saturday evening, May 23rd, we were on our way. We were finally going home. We drove out of the city and through suburbs, then into the country.
By the time the sun was setting, we were in the middle of a cactus forest with heavy underbrush. The road was narrow and wound back and forth like a canyon road. There were no shoulders on the road and the lanes were just wide enough for a semi truck. I wondered how two trucks could pass, since in many places the road dropped off on both sides within an inch of the white lines on the edges. I felt like I was in the middle of a western movie. The orange sunset made the cactus look like silhouettes. It was really pretty. Jim had to concentrate on driving because the van proved to be hard to control. It wanted to wander and there was no place to wander to. After a few hours, we stopped for the night at a little motel that accepted dogs.
The next day was more of the same. The road proved to be about 400 miles longer than we expected it to be because of all the curves. By the time we reached Ensenada, we had crossed 5 mountain ranges, or as Jim puts it we crossed the same mountain range 5 times. The road didn’t get any better. After we passed the state line that separates Baja Calif Sur, from Baja Calif Nor, the cactus changed. The landscape began to be laid out like huge rock gardens with cactus and wild flowers and other plants peeking out here and there. It was beautiful too.
We reached Ensenada on the third day, in the evening. We wanted to get across the border before dark so we hurried on. That was our mistake! We should have stopped for the night. Because when we got to the border, we waited in line for two hours. Then just before we were ready to go through the gate, our line quit moving. We waited for a full hour with out one more car going through the gate. The attendant that was working in our line, had disappeared. Finally another attendant appeared and we got through the border. By that time it was 11:30 at night and we were really tired. We had traveled 500 miles and waited 3 hours. Now we had no place to sleep. We didn’t want to stop in LA basin because we figured it would be hard to find a motel that would take a dog. We also thought the motels would be pretty pricey there. So we decided to go a little farther.
We didn’t know the shortcut to get to I15 and Jim really didn’t want to drive all the way into LA to catch it. We stopped and he pulled up the GPS on his computer to show us the way. We figured that if we stayed on state roads we would miss the toll booths. This was important because the toll booths didn’t take pasos and we didn’t have enough US money. Actually we had $2 between us.
We were wrong. The road we ended up taking had a toll booth and when we tried to feed our two $1 bills into it, it took one but would not take the other. We were stuck. We tried and tried to make it work but the bill had a small tear and it would not except it. There was nothing to do but to keep going. When we came to the next toll booth, we just kept going. We couldn’t think of anything else to do. So we decided we would just pay the tickets when they came. Trouble is, that we have our Mexican plates on the car and we aren’t there to get the tickets when they come, if they come. I don’t know what they will do to us now. They may not let us back in California. I don’t know how they handle it when a Mexican car runs the toll booth without paying. But we kept on going.
We tried to pull over and sleep twice during the night. First at a rest area that was too full. Then up the street a ways we pulled over again for a while, but couldn’t sleep because the seats were too uncomfortable so we kept going. When we finally came to an area where we could get a motel, it was already morning. If we got a motel now, we would have to be out of there by check out time, around 11. Or we would have to pay for two days. We decided to keep going.
We finally made it to St George. By this time I was pretty cranky and Jim was having problems too. We decided to stop at Karen’s, even if we were too tired to be much company. But Karen wasn’t home. We kept going.
We stopped in Beaver around 2:30 and got a room. We slept the rest of the day and all night, with only a short break to get cleaned up.
Then we headed for home, refreshed and ready to go. We arrived home around noon on Wednesday. We were really ready to be home!