Steph and Kyle’s mis-adventures in Mexico. So, if you’re familiar at all with how things work in Mexico you know that nothing ever really goes as planned. The key is to keep your sense of humor and expect the unexpected and roll with it. Luckily Kyle and I have similar traveling styles. Also, different things frustrate us at different times, so one of us is usually the voice of reason. Yesterday we took a trip to Mexicali to go to the SAT office to get an electronic signature for our HOA. After that, we were planning to return to Rocky Point and have a weekend alone because the kids were in Phoenix waiting for their cousins to come to town for Spring Training. I am the gastronome in our relationship, so I was already planning our culinary adventures. Kyle finds it amusing that I’m always planning our eating, but he rarely complains about my choices. While he was meeting with the SAT representative, I was checking Yelp for lunch. After about thirty minutes with the SAT people and our interpreter, it turned out that we were missing two pages of the document, one of which had a Notario stamp, so we couldn’t complete our business, we were going to have to come back once we had the complete document.
At that point we offered our interpreter a ride back to his school because he’d taken a taxi. We ended up with a great tour of Mexicali and great conversation. However, while we were driving, we got a message from our family in Phoenix that the cousins weren’t coming because of travel warnings and the kids were all crying and upset. Now we had a choice, continue to Rocky Point and our childless weekend; or return to Phoenix and get them. We decided the weekend wouldn’t be as enjoyable with phone calls every few minutes, as only kids know how to do. By this point we were already on the highway to San Luis, so we decided to cross there instead of going back to Mexicali, which was swamped when we crossed at 10 am. Suddenly, we spotted the sign to Los Algodones, so we took a quick detour, thinking it would be a great short cut…
We were happily trucking down a two-lane road through beautiful countryside. We could see the border wall and Colorado River to our right. there was no traffic. It was beautiful. I’ve been curious about the dental tourism in Algodones for a while too, so score to that too. At this point, I should mention it’s about 1 pm, we haven’t eaten anything yet today, because we were planning a nice lunch somewhere fun… We were starting to joke about one of us getting hangry soon. We roll into Algodones, which is not at all what I was expecting from my online research, but it was fairly quaint. It became apparent quickly there were some cute touristy restaurants but no parking.
Ok, so we went in search of the border thinking we’d just eat once we got to Yuma. I’d read most people park on the US side and just walk over the border, so we didn’t think the wait would be that bad by car. Oh, but we were wrong. We quickly found the border (it’s a really small town) and then we saw the line of cars – one line – weaving up one street and around another – probably about a mile long. And that’s when the hangry monster hit me. I was pissed that there are no easy border crossings. I was starving, and I had to pee. We stopped at an OXXO to get snacks and use the bathroom. No bathroom. I’m really starting to lose my cool. Kyle jumps in at this point thankfully. He pulls up to a restaurant we’ve passed a few times, an orange building that says Antojitos Mexicanos La Goyis. It says open, so we go in and we are in a small family owned restaurant with no menu. Thankfully there was a regular there who spoke enough English to relate our choice should be the machaca burrito plate. We ordered, used the very clean restroom, and got a bottle of Coke. A few minutes later our food came out. It was three homemade tortillas around machaca beef served with rice and beans. It honestly was the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I’m actually dreaming of going back just for that machaca.
Once we’d eaten, we decided to just wait it out at the border here because it didn’t make that much sense to backtrack all the way to San Luis only to get in a line there. BWT was estimating an hour wait. It ended up being two hours, but we were able to see the entire town during our winding wait. It turns out that there are only two lanes crossing back into the states and thus the cause of the hold up. We eventually got back to Phoenix at about 8:30 that night, marriage intact and laughing at our crazy day…even though nothing went as planned, we still had a great time, and stories to talk about.
Happy and Safe travels to everyone!
