Laredo,

For us Laredo was a destination, our last stop in the US, and now we are here I don’t that that’s going to change. I can’t see us meandering like tourists in a feels-like temperature of 115 degrees and young Rusty is not at all keen to leave the hotel suite we are hunkering down in! 

I know this summer has been blistering hot all over the south even though we managed to stay at altitude and avoid much of it on our travels but the heat has caught up to us, even this late in the year. Sunday morning at seven o’clock Rusty and I went for a walk and Laredo was empty except for himself and me. 

Then an elderly couple cane then the sidewalk. They may have been my age but responsibilities and life were weighing on them. She greeted me in Spanish and I answered in kind which was when she asked if Rusty bites. To their credit they believed me and she petted him while her husband smiled uncertainly behind her. We have to go to work she said setting off down the sidewalk. That question: Does he bite? will start every encounter south of the Rio Grande. 

We got flu and RSV vaccinations in Houston but for some reason Laredo got the newest Covid vaccine before so we made a date to meet Mauricio the pharmacist and his needle Sunday afternoon. Arriving at Walmart we saw half a parking full of US and Mexican trucks apparently waiting for cross border loads. 

There are companies m either side of the river that deal with border crossings for freight. Some trailer loads are transshipped to trailers from the other country, while others are brought  across from the US to Mexico or vice versa with their loads intact for direct forward delivery. It turns out commercial cross border traffic is huge here. In fact there is a truck-only border crossing between the two cities. 

There is a car bridge downtown as well as a pedestrian crossing which we used years ago. In fact we walked into Mexico using our drivers licenses so that dates our journey. Nowadays you need a passport or a passport card to walk across. Our plan now is to take the Colombia bridge, the furthest red mark on the left (below) which is the main tourist route half an hour from town. The next mark is the trucks only crossing and the two downtown are the pedestrian and car crossings. Lots of choices!

Our plan after Colombia, is to take Highway 2 bypassing Nuevo Laredo and setting off toward Monterrey and Saltillo which is the city where GANNET2 was born. Sleeping at truck stops and not stopping to be tourists we hope we can be in Oaxaca at our favorite campground in three or four days. 

The tolls will amount to roughly $110 but they are worth it when you are trying to make miles. We will rest a few days in Oaxaca and after Layne has her skin cancer stitches out in ten days we’ll press on to the coast for a swim before setting off rapidly for Guatemala and points south.

We sorted our paperwork into our travel bag where we keep our passports and Rusty’s papers, GANNET2’s Florida registration, title and Mexican insurance as well as the tourist cards and Temporary Import Pernit we will be issued at the border. It is vary rare for officials to ask to see our papers as we drive around but we keep them close at hand just in case. We also have our international vaccination cards which record our Covid jabs as well as tropical disease vaccinations like smallpox and diphtheria and so forth. What have we forgotten? Something inevitably. 

I always get a twinge leaving home. By now Mexican travel is a familiar thing for us and when I asked the pharmacist if he crosses very often he shrugged and said not in ten years. The cartels make life dangerous for Mexicans especially those who may own land wanted by the drug growers. The pharmacist told me he knew of two family friends who went to check on their plots of land in Mexico and who disappeared. They won’t bother you he said and I concurred as we have no stake in anything. We’ll drive through in a few hours on the main road and be gone.

So it’s time to go and see that which we neither of us have seen before, a new open road. New friends to make along the way, new problems to solve and shears the prospect of coming home to this comfortable easy life in a van, sinners in the US amen big friends and winters on a beach in Mexico. But only after we give South America the old college try.