bienvenidos a mexico

We made it! I loved driving through Mexico. I really did. It was a long road trip, but the kids actually rose to the occasion and there is some beautiful landscape that's fairly Rocky Mountain-esque. I absolutely love the mountains. Some people love the beach, but my perfect place to live would be on a mountain top somewhere. Mountains add diversity of landscape, they're nature's landmarks. It's so breath-taking to look out over the world from a mountain top where everything rests in perfect perspective. Even the mangled huts and broken homes that dot the landscape look beautiful from up there. These are googled images, but they are a perfect depiction of what we saw while driving through:





We hardly stopped, because there weren't a ton of safe places to stop. But we mostly stayed on toll roads, which made for a smoother, safer drive. However, it was terrible timing on our parts to arrive in Mexico City on a Friday afternoon. Wow. Ginormous mistake. Firstly, traffic was... let's just say it took two hours to go five miles. I nearly crashed about fifteen different times and almost ran over about a hundred different street vendors trying to sell their pistachios or whatever in the middle of the freeway. Secondly, there is usually one day out of the week you are not supposed to drive. Depending on what kind of car permit you may have, everyone has a different assigned day. Apparently for our type of permits, we are not supposed to drive on Fridays. Not only are we huge targets in general for the shady Mexican policia here with our Texas license plates, but we were driving on our unapproved day.

We ended up getting pulled over, and here, you have to bribe the police. They originally asked Bruce to pay an outrageous amount, and he negotiated but didn't have enough cash on him to pay them immediately. "Oh, that's okay," they said. "You can give us cash from the next ATM." However, they didn't want to be seen getting cash from him in front of the bank, because they didn't want it to look like he was "paying them off." Sketchy, dude. You don't want to know how much he had to pay them. Let's just say we could have bought several plane tickets back home to the U.S. with the cash we gave those thieving police officers. Sooo... 21 hours of driving time and mucho dinero later, we finally made it to our destination.


Bienvenidos a Mexico, verdad?