Borders

The border crossing couldn't have gone more smoothly . . . in fact, I never got out of the truck, never showed my face, never answered a question. Ross signed my name to my tourist visa -- right in front of the guy! He asked. "Should I take this out to her to sign?" The guy said no. It was better to just have Ross sign it. Figures.

At customs, Ross went in and registered the truck. He asked about the dogs. After all, we'd gone to a lot of trouble to get the proper paperwork signed by our vet on Monday night. They looked confused and said it wasn't necessary to register them. We got through customs with a green light, so we got no questions about our very tightly packed truck. Huh. All that angst, for naught.

We took the toll road to Mazatlan. It's pretty expensive and there was a lot of construction going on at first. We got lost in the first big town we came to (Hermosillo) because they blocked off the street we wanted to get onto.

By the way, Lainie mentioned OnStar in her comment . . . we do have a new GPS system that includes Mexico. Ross programmed her to have an Australian accent, so we call her Sheila. She did a lot of "recalculating" when we couldn't get on Avenida Rosales (or as Sheila pronounced it, "Row-sails.") We finally got to the toll road without much help from policemen we asked, or from Sheila herself.

We have a Trip Tik from AAA that's been the most help. Or, possibly, the most consistent.

Plus, Ross also printed out directions from Microsoft Streets and Trips. They're Plan C and we haven't looked at them yet.

We're in Mazatlan now. So it was Plan A or B -- or perhaps the ingenuity of the navigator -- that got us here.

We're in a hotel close to the beach. I think it's some kind of Spring Break. Or May Day celebration? (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANITA!) Parties galore. The whole place smells like cerveza.

Speaking of Sheila . . . she didn't have a clue when we entered the address and the name of the hotel didn't ring a bell -- but we did have a printed map from the Internet. With a GPS, even if they don't know what you want, you have the benefit of knowing exactly where you are on the map. That's really, really helpful.

It seemed to take forever to get here, but we arrived at 8:30, which is pretty much when we've gotten where we landed every day this week. Tomorrow will be a shorter day -- thank goodness! But still about 8 hours of driving. One of the worst parts of the day today were all the bugs hitting the windshield from about 5 p.m. until dark. Seriously, it sounded like a heavy rain pelting the front of the truck. We stopped as a gas station just to wash the windshield and within 5 minutes it looked the same as it had before.

The best thing about today was how easy the border crossing was and how sweet our puppies were the whole time. They're really wonderful traveling companions and we had no idea!

We have to figure out how to sneak them into nice restaurants and boutiques. Then we can take them to Europe with us.