In the history of our travels, today will be recorded as one of those days that hopefully makes us stronger. Adversity is good for that, if nothing else.

When planning the return trip, I carefully considered the amount of pesos I had left. Everything in Mexico seems to require cash (in the entire trip I never saw an opportunity to use a credit card), and so I was careful to ensure that we had enough pesos for a full tank of fuel, plus the tollbooths on Rt 15, plus a little extra.

This would have worked out well if we hadn’t run into a speedtrap near the airport in Hermosillo. We were in the lead, with Adam & Susan following, and so intent on finding the first turn of the detour that we apparently coasted through a speed zone at perhaps 35-40 MPH. I saw a guy in a white shirt waving me to the left turn lane, who turned out to be a Hermosillo police officer.

He spoke no English and we speak virtually no Spanish. This was a worst-case scenario, because (as best we could determine), he felt we were facing a fine of 650 pesos (about $65) and, after confiscating my driver’s license, explained with much sign language that we were expected to drive to the central police station, pay the fine, and return to the scene of the crime with the receipt to retrieve my driver’s license.

Now, I can’t blame the guy for the communication problem, because we were in his country and hadn’t bothered to learn enough of the local language to make this process easier. He was being very friendly about the whole thing, and even started off the conversation with a handshake. But we could not conceive of how we were going to negotiate Hermosillo traffic to the police station, find parking for a 53-foot combination, and return to the side of the road, in anything less than a day or two. We also didn’t have an adequately detailed map of Hermosillo on us, since we only planned to pass through, and the GPS doesn’t contain city maps in Mexico. So it looked like a no-win situation.

We tried to call friends in the US for translation assistance, but of course Telmex did not remove the international call block on my phone as they had promised to do, so the phone was utterly useless in this instance. Fortunately, the police officer realized his compadre did speak some English, and the second officer was more sympathetic to our plight. He accepted 500 pesos, and gave us a receipt and my license back. We chatted a bit about his three kids, his trip to Disneyland, shook hands, and very carefully began to flee Hermosillo. At least the ticket is unlikely to be reported to my insurance company, so my rates won’t go up.

This episode wiped out most of the cash I had set aside for fuel, creating a new problem. We stopped at a Pemex station on the north side of Hermosillo, and I waved my only remaining peso bills at the attendant, a 100 and a 50. I made it clear that was the amount of fuel I wanted, verified he had zero’d out the pump, and stood by to make sure.

Then Eleanor called out, “We have a flat!” Sure enough, the rear curbside tire had a huge screw-like object embedded in the edge of the tread, and air was loudly hissing out of the tire at an alarming rate. OK, one problem at a time. I went back to the pump and found that the attendant had put in 200 pesos worth of fuel. I had a brief argument with him and once again waved my 150 pesos at him, and he just shrugged (not understanding a word of what I had said, I am sure) and waited.

I decided I had bigger fish to fry, so we dug up another 50 pesos in change, paid for the 28 liters of fuel with a scowl, and quickly backed the trailer into a quiet spot away from the pumps to change the tire.

My tire-changing skills have had a lot of practice lately. I can change an Airstream tire in less than 10 minutes working alone. With Adam’s help it was probably even less this time. The tire, however, was a total loss, so that was an expensive flat. I tossed it in the spare holder and made a note to get a new tire in Tucson.

At this point you can imagine that I was not especially cheery. Between the ticket and the tire our tab for driving through Hermosillo was about $180. Moreover, we were almost completely out of cash, our credit cards were just bits of plastic that nobody seemed to respect, and we were facing 180 miles of road and three tollbooths with no spare tire or money.

I considered stopping for the night at the same campground where we stayed on the way in, so that we could replace the wounded tire and perhaps find some money, but an overwhelming desire to get away from Hermosillo suddenly came over me.

The drive up Rt 15 is supposed to be pretty good. It is, after all, a toll road, and the fee for us to drive it was 156 pesos. For that you might expect a smooth road, but Rt 15 has been neglected too long and long stretches of it are riddled with bumps and potholes, and the parts that are not afflicted are covered in orange cones for the reconstruction work. The speed limit periodically dropped from 100 kph to 40 kph (about 25 MPH) for miles, and this drastically extended the trip. In all, our drive from Bahia Kino to Tucson took over nine hours, including stops for fuel, flats, bathroom stops, lug nut checks, and border delays.

This time, to avoid the nerve-wracking downtown Nogales roads that make you feel like you are a rock in an avalanche, we took the commercial truck route through Mariposa. The roads are better, but a few miles before the border we ran into a typically Mexican traffic situation. We found ourselves in a line of tractor-trailers parked in the travel lanes, waiting for … something … We could not tell what, and there were no signs to suggest what we were doing there.

After a few minutes, a man came by and gestured adamantly that we were to go into the left lane and bypass the trucks. We did so, very reluctantly, because the left lane turned out to be the median strip and it was barricaded by large concrete planters. We zig-zagged around these obstacles until we came face-to-face with a fence.

We sat there for a minute or two, absolutely bewildered, and finally observed a black SUV passing us driving in the oncoming traffic lane. It waited until there was no traffic coming, then scooted about 300 yards on the wrong side of the road and disappeared to the right behind a barricade. We realized we were expected to do the same.

So we did, and after the strange detour found ourselves in front of the immobile line of trucks. We waved to a guy with a big gun in an army uniform, who apparently had no interest in us, and continued on, wondering what the heck had just happened. Only a few hours earlier we had been fined $50 for driving too fast past the airport, and now here we were not only allowed to drive on the wrong side of the road against oncoming traffic, but actually encouraged to.

But at this point we were getting used to strange checkpoints and frequent contacts with officialdom. In all, we were stopped nine times by officials, once by the Hermosillo Police, twice at tollbooths on Rt 15, once at a military checkpoint, once at the commercial truck station, again at a third toll booth, twice at US customs (first at the entry point, then again for agricultural inspection), and finally by the US Border Patrol along I-19 in Arizona. We must be pretty clean by now, because everyone has had a good look at us.

Beside the speeding fine, we lost 231 pesos to the tollbooths, 20 pesos in tips to the guys at the gas station who washed our windows without being asked, and four raw eggs to the Agricultural Inspector. By the end, we were completely tapped out of cash and dipping into emergency dollars. My advice to those who would drive into Sonora: bring lots of folding money and don’t expect an ATM around the corner.

Thus it was a great relief to pull into the Shell station on the US side of the border and swipe the old credit card again. It’s always a sensation to come back into the USA from Mexico, because you are struck by the absence of trash by the roadsides, and the sudden disappearance of shacks and tortilla sellers along the roads. The lack of killer speedbumps (“topes”) is nice too. I liked Mexico but life is pretty convenient here in el norte.

We are home again in Tucson, for four nights. We need to move a few more things into the trailer for extended travel, clean the house, get a new spare tire, and finalize details with our house-sitters.
I’ll post pictures of the brutal huge screw-thing in our tire tomorrow when I get it fixed, and if we are lucky we’ll go on a nice hike up in the Rincons this weekend too.