Day 20 (278km): Habla espanol?

It was nice waking up to the chill of the air conditioning at the good old Best Western. The best thing about american hotels is full american breakfast in the lobby. Surprisingly it didn't take a whole lot of time or effort to pack up all our stuff, considering that it looked like our stuff had exploded in the room. We bought 2 cooling vests they sold at Iron Horse and today we were going to try them out for the first time. How they work: you soak them in water and as the water evaporates from the vest it keeps you cool. I love science. After saying goodbye to my parents and purchasing some Mexican Auto insurance we were on the road. 

Goodbye

 

We drove the interstate straight south to Nogales. Nothing too exciting was happening there. At the border there were these interesting speed bumps. There were metal domes arranged in a linear pattern. Not a problem when there is only one line of them, but a little tricky when there are several rows in an equilateral pattern. Also I got the red light at the border check station and the second one 21km from the border as well. So we got sniffed by the dog, and we had to empty our cases. Thankfully she only searched the easy access cases not the rok strapped bags. The weird thing was not having to go into Immigration at the border. We were free to roam Nogales. We didn't. Our main objective was to head due south.

First gas stop in the foreign land

We drove HWY 15 until the customs checkpoint 21km from the border. There we got our passports stamped and the appropriate paper work filled out for bringing our bikes into the country. Sounds smooth... well I guess it was smooth but it was also lengthy and very hot. It was probably an hour until we were done with everything and finally had a piece of pizza in the shade. A thunderstorm was also bearing down on us at this point, so we quickly got back on the road heading south. 

The unfriendly weather

 

It was nasty weather. You could see the lightning, quite impressive actually, as we were driving towards it. Luckily we only got rained on for a few seconds and before things got really ugly, we exited to HWY 2 and headed west to the coast. There was no rain, but boy was it windy. The weather was still chasing us so we decided to stop at a nice, new looking hotel. It was a little out of the budget but it was getting late. The weather was getting worse and we felt like there will be plenty of time to stay in cheap places and start camping once we get deeper into Mexico and get a feel for things. We took the advice of Susan and Grant from horizons unlimited: some of the best hotels are the ones that you can get by the hour. 

Camping for the night :)