Bienvenidos

Everybody we talked to said the drive from Austin to El Paso is the longest most boring car ride ever. Let’s just say that Mari and I placed bets on minutes passed before seeing another human being. A typical winning answer was approximately 8 minutes.

We stopped in Lyndon B. Johnson’s hometown and had sandwiches at the site of the World’s Best Chicken Fried Steak (nearly 3 dozen sold!). This was also the first time we heard the word “howdy” as a greeting. It was official. We were in the middle of nowhere.

After spending the night in a motel in a city that has a single entry in the AAA book (home of the largest roadrunner statue in the world), we got back on the road as quickly as possible.

Around El Paso, Mari and I realized that if we hooked a quick left, we’d be in Mexico. Mari had never seen Mexico before, so we decided to take an exit and see if we could get her a better view. Little did we know, the exit we took off of I-10 funneled us directly in to Mexico! Bienvenidos a Mexico! There was no turning around.

The custom agents waved us through and suddenly everything was written in Spanish. This was when I got extremely nervous.

I didn’t have my passport with me. Not knowing the current requirements of border crossing, I was spazzing out and imagining myself locked away as an illegal alien in a foreign country. I kept telling Mari things like, “Try not to hit any 3 year old kids with your car. They’ll never give us a fair trial” and “If they lock me away forever, do you think my friends will visit?’ After 30 minutes of looking for an open burrito stand in the middle of siesta, Mari and I decided it would be best to get back on the road as soon as possible to relieve me of my border-induced anxiety.

The border agents told us to pull over the car. We were being inspected, because the bright red haphazardly packed VW Golf didn’t seem normal to them.

“What was your purpose of traveling to Mexico?” a man asks Mari after glancing at her ID with piqued interest.
“Oh, I had never been to Mexico before and we’re driving cross-country and we thought it would be a fun pit stop.”
“How long were you here for?”
“Umm. About 45 minutes, more or less.”

This got his attention. Three border agents gathered around the car and opened the hatchback. They were staring at a jumble of boxes and furniture held together with a mortar of Mari’s dirty laundry. Canines stood nearby, waiting to sniff around on command and find the proverbial heroin needle in the haystack. The border agents huddled around and had a quick conference. “Eh, I guess they look fine”. “Yeh, I think we should let them go.” “Yeah, me too.” “They’re from DC. Headquarters”. “Yeh, they’re cool.”

They hand us back our IDs.
“So you were just here for 45 minutes, right?”
“Yeh.”
“Never do that again.”