1st Day in Mexico

As you know, the day started miserably with the hairdryer alarm clock. After that it was time for breakfast and I tried to tell the waitress, who didn't speak English, that I wanted the omelette with a side order of french toast. What I got was the omelette meal, plus the french toast meal. Well, I ate them both. Too much food. And that led to a shit-attack that lasted a couple of hours. By 10:30 it was down to just the drizzlin' shits so we headed for the border.



First problem: I have two tires strapped to the back. The customs lady asked me if they were new. One side of my brain was processing that question, along with its repercussions, while the other side of my brain (the swollen half) turned my mouth on and made it say "yes". Ok, now they want me to pay customs on these new tires, but by then the logical part of the brain caught up to the mouth-connected brain and I all of a sudden didn't hablo anymore espanol. I eventually got out that yes, these are used tires and I think she got tired of me going "que?" all the time and let me go.

Nate and I park in the lot and I go in first. Right from the git-go there is a problem. Apparently I didn't check out of Baja last time I was there? WTF? With the aduana guy doing a lot of talking and me doing un poco entiendo, I wasn't understanding what was what. Finally I said "Tengo uno problemo, verdad?" (I have a problem, right?) and he said "si". So I walk out all frustrated while Nate goes in, trying to figure out a solution to this problem. I'm sure in the end it can all be worked out with money, but I ain't got none.



Anyways, I go back in and in my new, broken spanish I really try hard to understand the problem. After about 10 minutes of lo siento, no entiendo, (I'm sorry, I don't understand) the guy finally got frustrated with me and started stamping my passport. Awesome! Knock out the rest of the paperwork and we're off!



The highlight of the day for me was the military checkpoint. We got off the bikes, removed our helmets and started having a great conversation with the guys. One of the soldiers spoke pretty good English and he helped me out with my Spanish, too, plus, Nate could participate happily, too. I think we spent at least half an hour there. How cool is that? I broke out my dye-sub printer and printed out a couple of photos for the guys. Here's one:



I need to look on my video camera and see if I captured anything with the checkpoint. I'm not sure. The video takes so much more time to edit and process, let's see what I can find.

Anyway, here's some neato pics, all touristy looking. Me gusta.





This is inside:



This is the weather out my front door right now