Out of the Blue and straight into 'Merica

 Hola Amigos, 

Our internal alarm clocks have adjusted to getting up early, so that we are packed and in our seats for the day. Usually, the intent is to hit the highway before rush hour. Albeit, I am not entirely sure if the traffic ever stops in Central America.

This morning's route was definitely a "fly by the seat of your pants" kind of plan. We knew we could make the border if we didn't fool around. There are 2 general routes that we had chosen. One included a good wander Northwest and the other was almost 2 hours shorter, straight up to Texas. No brainer, right? Wrong. The pinball route sounded great, but has had a lot of negative media attention in the past for various issues. If you want to google, I am certain you can find the history of it being a hotspot for criminal activity. We were told by our local friend that it is safe and to head out early in the morning and be more concerned about the abundance of transport trucks passing, than anything else. He was correct in his advice. There were tons of transports and American plated vehicles going like the speed of light over the potholes. LOL To put it in perspective, this road is similar to our 4 lane highway for 95% of the way. I was anxious at first. If I am being perfectly honest, I have been anxious since the whole no communicado hotel a couple days ago. 

The drive went by smoothly once we got caffeinated! One checkpoint, where we were waved on through. There was plenty of patrol cars during our drive and some really beautiful scenery. We arrived at the border around 10:15 am. Exiting out of Mexico was exactly what we thought it would be, a bit confusing. Drive here, go there, enter here, no not here, go there, no over there first, we are going to search your vehicle, no you don't need your vehicle searched, get in line and then bam, we were out. Someone advised me to create an inventory list in English and Spanish. It has come in super handy, a couple times. We handed it over, she opened the door and wished us well.  

Cue our entrance to America, the great! Dolly rolls up past the stop sign, excited to see her home state of Texas. I saw the look from the border agent, he was clearly not impressed with Dolly's eagerness (or Steph not noticing the stop sign). When we get to the kiosk, we got the same "holy ole gringo in a Honduras truck" look. Then the interview started with, "sir, you need to stop behind the stop sign next time" and leave it to my husband to reply "yes sir, apologies, I just heard all about it from my wife".  He chuckled a bit, asked some routine questions, checked our truck documents and wished us well.  

We carried on to Harlingen, Tx for a hotel and an appointment to have some maintenance done on the ole Doomsday truck. She will get an oil change, an alignment and tires balanced. Alignment and tire balancing are things that are not commonly done in Honduras, or at least not in Roatan. The roads are rough and it would be futile. Our mechanic, in Roatan, has done the drive from Texas to Honduras almost 100 times, during his career as a mechanic with a car dealership. He gave us some tips from his experiences over the years and one was to change the oil when we got to Texas. Hard work, in hot weather warrants it. He also changed the brake pads before we left even though they did not look terrible and we soon figured out why. I am not sure there are many people who would take the time to prep us as well as he did and then say if you have any issues, call me and I will walk you through what to do. 

I have been missing the babies (the big ones and the little ones) this week, so I was thankful for a FaceTime with Holly & Ivy (Auggie was asleep) today, as well as having the service to text Kass & Casey and the boys. We are settled in for the evening and very much looking forward to leisurely coffee in the morning, as well as getting our laundry done. Perhaps we will have time to do a little bird nerding while Dolly is being taken care of. 

Until tomorrow, 

Gigi