Lynne and Greg's Excellent Adventure

Heading Home – Day 1 & 2 by Greg Collett

We’d been counting down the days left in Ajiic for a while. We both got anxious to get home. The day finally arrived on Tuesday. We’d driven Ron and Bev, after a nice visit, to the airport on Monday around noon. Back at the house in the afternoon, we finished packing and loaded up the car. We’d given away just enough stuff that everything did fit into the car, but just barely. The last 2 things to go in were our overnight knapsacks. I had to lower the side window so that, after shoving the bags in, I could hold them in place through the open window as I slammed the door shut.

Tuesday morning we headed out at 6:45 am. We made it through Guadalajara pretty early so, we didn’t get slowed down there. Lynne packed a ton of food for the car so we almost didn’t have to stop along the way. 9 hours of driving got us 850k to Saltillo. We’d stayed there at the Camino Real Hotel, and stayed there again this time. We had a couple of drinks in the bar and some terrible Mexican snack food and hit the sack by about 10:00.

We were on the road by 7:30 after breakfast this morning and headed out on our 3.5 hour drive to the border. We stuck to the toll roads again today and made great time. It’s really nice to drive on nice smooth asphalt again. Nice not to hear the car shaking like crazy rolling slowly down the Ajijic cobblestone roads!

The last 50k or so was a bit nerve-racking. Over the last few days about 120 bodies have been discovered in mass graves along the road. That section apparently is one of the worst for drug related problems these days. Our worries were a waste though. There were tons of military on he road. We didn’t have a hint of trouble. We stopped at the car sticker place and handed ours back in. If we hadn’t, and we’d come back into the country again, they would have assumed that we’d sold the car in Mexico and would have charged us the tax on the sale! We go into the lineup to cross the bridge into Laredo and slowly made our way to the guard. He spent about 10 minutes talking to us, but then, after a total time of an hour, we crossed the bridge and entered the USA.

We stopped up the road a bit and bought some lunch. Lynne headed over to a Target store while I went to check on an iPad2 at Best Buy. Luckily, they were out of stock so, I wasn’t in trouble when I got bak to the car. 2.5 hours later we got to the Riverwalk Plaza hotel in San Antonio.

We got here at the perfect time. Fiesta is on this week. Bands playing all over the place. It’s going to be a fun day here tomorrow!

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