We started the day at a truck stop in Santa Ana in Sonora and ended the day moochdocking with friends in Benson Arizona. It was a long day by any measurement.
One reason I hate flying is because the journey of a few hours completely transforms the nature of your experience. You wake up on one continent and go to sleep in a different time zone or continent or culture. The change is abrupt. I spent many summers as a child waking up in London eating bacon speaking English and petting Bobby our family dog. By six o’clock that night I was in a hot Mediterranean climate speaking Italian over a plate of pasta while explaining to my friends that quarantine laws prevented me from flying with my dog and they would never meet Bobby. I grew to hate airports and the sudden transformations they wrought in my life. I still do.
And there we were flying through a hole in the time/space continuum in our modest Promaster van, GANNET2, named for Webb Chiles’ boat and behaving like the Starship Enterprise. On Wednesday we boldly went from Mexico through a quiet village backwater and catapulted ourselves into the chaos and traffic of a surprisingly busy Arizona summer. It felt busy to us but the snowbirds are long gone from here as they are from San Carlos!
We drove back to Arizona the way we came, and the road though the same identical road felt like a new trail across the mountains. We reminisced as we drove, thinking back to that cold rainy December 30th when we left Bisbee full of trepidation and hope. People nag so much about Mexico’s dangers you have to stop yourself wondering if they could be right, that your own memories of pleasures past might be leading you into a dead end.
Of course the part six months driving around Mexico, indeed the entire eight months since retirement October 25th have been far more joyous and fun and rewarding than we could have hoped. And this journey isn’t over, not by a long chalk.
This wasn’t a vacation or a break, this was van life created by two old farts and their dog, two experienced travelers who want to see more of the world from their van. We aren’t living in a van to make money on YouTube or to impress strangers…it’s not a “lifestyle choice” dictated by poverty or a desire to Abe money though it is helpful that way!
Our 21 foot Promaster is our only home and the best possible tool for us to see the bits of the world our good health and the van’s strength will help us to see. As we drove away from the government office in Cananea where we had handed in our Temporary Import Permit Layne paused the book on tape and said she has no desire to live anywhere but GANNET2, the van we named after Webb Chiles’s tiny circumnavigator, a Moore 24 sailboat. He suggested it and we agreed with alacrity though it seems hard to imagine we shall drive as far as he has sailed the original GANNET.
We approached the border with some sadness, the chapter that had rewarded us with splendid memories was closing as it had to. In the distance we could see the southernmost mountains of Arizona beckoning.
We were driving to a new set of experiences, new roads, new challenges and new campsites. We are retired and with no plans to go to work.
As we closed in on Naco Sonora, the dusty little town on the border we could see across the valley five miles away the straight brown line of the border wall and behind it the little town of Bisbee in the hills.
When we arrived in Naco in December there was snow on the mountains and we wanted to camp on the beach and we had miles to drive so we barely noticed Naco as we figured out the driving and the roads and the locations of the government offices for our paperwork. On our way out it was different.
We found a coffee shop on Google maps so we paused and Layne ordered us cappuccinos while I walked Rusty one last time in Mexico.
Sierra Vista appears to have donated some trash cans to Naco whether it is aware or not. I doubt the county seat of Cochise County minds.
It was lovely to pause in the shade and watch the world pass by. Down the street a quarter mile we could see the wall and the Mexican flag above the port of entry. It was time.
I made one last deviation and took a dude Street looking for a tortilla shop that was unfortunately closed.
The side street dead ended by a dentist’s shop advertising for US clients outside, next to some street murals:
We passed a couple of US pedestrians crossing the border but as usual it’s the Mexicans who wave and the Americans everywhere in Mexico, even on the border who studiously ignored us right to the end!
“To USA” pointed the arrow. We waved to three soldiers standing next to the line and stopped to hand our passports to an Immigration official sitting under a canopy at the line. He waved us into the first inspection station. We were in the US!
We had a five minute interview with a cheerful young man and we explained we’d dumped all fruits vegetables and meat and had nothing to declare. He noted our particulars and told us to bypass the secondary inspection bay. We turned left and that was that.
The street led us round the back of the border post past the old port of entry now preserved for posterity.
And then as suddenly as an airplane flight you are in Arizona and Mexico is a million miles away, as unattainable as a distant star.
We thought we had left the land of topes behind but Arizona welcomed us with a couple of speed bumps of their own just to remind us of another reason why we were happy to be home. We had a tank full of Pemex gas at $3:28 a gallon but that will only last for 350 miles…
Bruce and Celia joined us for a hearty American lunch filled with laughter.
And we look forward to a summer of driving and seeing old friends before we find ourselves back here for another drive through Mexico and then on south to Panama and all the complexity of getting GANNET2 and ourselves to Colombia. We aren’t finished with Mexico just yet.
