Shakedown in Mexico

Time to head home! It had been 24 hours since the storm, and the sandy roads out of Las Conchas were finally passible. Whew! We stopped in Puerto Peñasco to get gas. Many of the roads were flooded, and we had to work our way through town turning whenever we encountered impassible roads.

While John pumped gas, I took a video of everyone driving through a flooded intersection. The video is complete with Mexican music, coming from somewhere nearby.

Eventually, of course, one of the cars didn’t make it and got stuck in the water.

At that point, people started driving down the left hand side of the road instead. So that’s what we did too.

It was only a block before we could get back to the right side of the road!

The talking you hear in this video is our navigation system. Our cheerful navigation narrator did not realize we were on the wrong side of the road, or maybe she would have had something to say about that, lol.

Whew, we made it out of town. Next hurdle – we had to make it across the border.

We got as far as Sonoyta before things got interesting. Sonoyta is right along the border on the Mexican side. We were almost to the crossing when – John got pulled over by a police car.

I really, really wanted to take a picture for this blog, but I figured that might irritate them, so I refrained.

The policeman walked up to the van and told us he had pulled us over for speeding. Believe me, we weren’t speeding. Yes, we know the difference between mph and kph. John’s a scientist for pete’s sake. John even takes into account the fact that our extra large tires make our speedometer read slightly lower than our actual speed. We had it handled. We weren’t speeding.

Nonetheless, there we were, along the side of the road, being accused of being over the speed limit by 21 kph. The policeman wanted 3,000 pesos, which is about $160 US, and threatened us with writing up a ticket. He told us we would then have to take the ticket somewhere (it was a little unclear where), and pay in cash. It had to be paid in cash. Well, we didn’t have that much cash. We wondered what would happen if we took the ticket, ignored it, and just drove home?

John told the policeman that we didn’t have that much cash. The policeman then asked how much we had. John emptied his wallet. $75 in US dollars. The policeman took that, and then wanted to know how much I had. Usually I keep $10 in my phone case, along with my driver’s license and a credit card. I searched my phone case, but couldn’t locate the $10. I was quite surprised I couldn’t find it and kept looking and looking. I searched and searched with increasing puzzlement and frenzy – I think it must have looked like I was a bad actor, comically overdoing my search! But honestly I don’t know what happened to that $10 I thought I had.

I also had $100 or so in a piece of luggage somewhere else in the van, but I didn’t mention that. How would they know? Unless they had a cash-sniffing dog.

In the end, he took John’s $75 and let us go without a ticket. Now we can add “bribed a Mexican policeman” to our bucket list of crazy things we’ve been doing lately. That’s even worse than driving on the wrong side of the road in Mexico!

Lessons learned: don’t carry very much cash in your wallet while in Mexico. Carry any additionally needed cash hidden somewhere else.

Also we plan to research what would happen if we were to totally blow off a ticket and try to drive home without paying for it. We don’t want to end up in Mexican jail, lol. Because, yeah, of course we’re going back. It was a great trip!

The actual border crossing back into the US only took a moment. The border guard looked at our passports and waved us through. They didn’t even glance into the van. We could have been bringing anything and everything back into the US with us! Everything except cash in John’s wallet, lol.

Bye, Mexico, we’ll be back!

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