5:30 pm
well, today we have accomplished much! we got up at 7 and left the hotel at 7:30 this morning (lookit us, getting up all early like some kinda grown ups!) we made great time through northern mexico!
in matamoros, we had one final, hilarious mexican moment. there are basically mexican squeegee kids at all stoplights in big cities, and this guy, well, he wouldn't take no for an answer. he skipped up with his bottle of soapy water, and despite our protests, squirted the driver's side of the windshield and went to town. he didn't ask for any money, since we obviously would have preferred he NOT squeegee our fairly clean windshield. however, he left it in a worse state than he found it, all smeary and gross. as such, mike activated the fantastic technology we possess called "windshield washer and wipers". the kid had broken the driver's side windshield wiper! so now aside from being smeary, there was washer fluid all over the windshield, and no functioning wiper to sweep it away. oh, mexico. at this point, we're just hoping it doesn't rain any time soon :/
we reached the border at about 1:30 pm, and went for it. the aduana (mexican customs) office was in a bit of a weird spot (although it was NOTHING compared to nuevo laredo - we'd 100% recommend the matamoros/brownsville border crossing over the laredo/nuevo laredo crossing. people even spoke a bit of english, which was fabulous), but we found it with the help of a friendly... guy? he had a uniform on, but i've got no idea what his job was. "tourist herder", maybe?? anyway, you may recall we were a bit worried about leaving mexico, due to the questionable legality of the defiant. however, there was nothing to worry about. the guy at the immigration desk came out and looked the defiant over, took a picture of the VIN, forced mike to get a copy of his passport made for $3 pesos (i made plenty of copies before we left, however apparently they are anti-environment - they wouldn't accept my copy because it was not full page sized :| ), stamped some stuff, made mike sign a reciept, and gave us the $300 deposit back. bam. done. while this was happening i walked to the other side of the room and had a guy take our tourist visas and stamp our passports out - he didn't even make mike come over. (note: at first he said something about paying to leave, but then when he realized we flew into mexico - this time - he said nevermind. i'm not sure what that was about, but yay, free!)
after finishing our mexico paperwork (this took about 45 minutes, most of which was us failing at finding the office and the nice man helping us), we paid our last mexican toll $67 pesos ($5 CAD) to get across the bridge into the states. there was a lineup of cars on the american side, and i'd say we waited about half an hour. the american customs guy didn't give us any trouble, really, although when i mentioned we had an orange he said we had to pull aside for inspection. we did, and two guys made us relinquish our orange and a stowaway grapefruit (something about diseases - apparently they incinerate them!!), and poked around for a few minutes, but didn't give us trouble. next, we were instructed to go to a "liquor control" booth, because we had about a half 26er of tequila and the bottom of a bottle of rum. again, no real hassle, we just had to pay about $7 USD in duty. i'd guess the american side, after the wait, took half an hour. not bad.
we clearly headed for the nearest starbucks, and drank our frappuccinos in about 3 minutes flat.
about 100 km north of the border, we were stopped at a border patrol checkpoint, there were two guys and a german shepherd there. one guy asked us if we were US citizens, i replied no, we're canadian. then he asked if we were born in canada (??), we said yes, and were waved through. weird.
we are currently heading for houston. when we realized we were on the american side of the border and it was not even 3 pm, we figured we might as well give'r to houston (about 550 km) to stay with leaha and greg, as opposed to getting a hotel room somewhere. we're expecting to arrive around 8 or 8:30.
it's crazy to be back in the states already.
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