Leaving Mexico

So the day of departure from this beautiful, jet for us not acceptable location, had finally arrived. After saying Good Bye to our neighbours, we rolled up to the paved highway turning north onto Carretera 15 after a few minutes.

The coach was running great with the temperature staying where it should be.

Had a short rest stop beside the highway then took on the last 1.5hrs until the border.

Our plan was crossing into the US at the Mariposa Truck border, but when getting into Nogales we both overlooked a sign to Mariposa, or maybe there wasn't a sign? There sure was a lot of construction going on. So we got sucked into one of the worst city traffics I have ever seen, and that includes driving a motor coach in Manhattan.

Honestly Nogales is worse, by a lot. Just imagine our 65ft rig moving along narrow city streets with tons of Mexican drivers while following the FRONTERA USA sign. But that is the crossing within the city - so not for us. We were looking for Mariposa border crossing. Bea was frantically trying to locate a way out of this hellscape and eventually directed the driver to hang a sharp left. Don't know how I bent the coach around that corner. The area we went through I have no words for. Chaos erupted all around us, but somehow we suddenly entered a broader highway and followed traffic.

A sign for the border crossing popped up. It showed a scary height restriction: 3m. Oooops!!! So we chose to break the line, which led us to a dead end. Yess, and a turn around operation looked pretty difficult. With Bea at the rear directing and holding back traffic, I backed up into the road we came from, then, after 3 attempts, I bent the hole thing a 180 around so we got out of this mouse trap. 

The area to the right showed closed gates. The truck border - now closed

 

"The Line to the border"

An inquiry with some police officers hanging around the area brought out the whole drama: The truck border crossing was closed until further notice or after a current trucker protest was over. So we had to get back in line, the very same line we had broken out of 15 minutes earlier. But for that I had to perform a full U-turn across a busy highway.

Again we were facing the height restriction of 3m which is ridiculously low for our rig. But at the same time there was also a sign for BUSES which lit a flame of hope in us.

2 CBP officers where just hanging around there so Bea shouted a question out the window. The 2.officer started walking up a lane beginning at our right and was now removing a cone and asking us to follow. 

The entry into that lane was so narrow that when I watched the trailer going by the concrete divider on the driver side there wouldn't have been space for a sheet of paper in between. So now we were in the right lane and moving towards a closed steel gate where an officer eventually appeared to open the barrier.

What followed after that was probably a routine inspection, involving 3 officers.

Next on the agenda was the slow drive through a scanner. Not more than 3miles/hr. please. What we missed was the green light above the scanner. So when the officer came running behind us we (I) were asked to please back the whole rig through the scanner to repeat the exercise. 

That scanner pass-through is only inches wider than our coach. Bea, who tried to be the spotter, was quickly ordered back into the coach. So the last act of this drama was finished when we made it successfully through the scanner a second time, and got the "Get the hell out of here" from the officer.

I might be partly, willfully or not, blind, (when I can't find the butter in the fridge) but yet I am pretty damn glad that I can back up a trailer and do wild U-turns on a busy street.

The first stop after the border was to fill up our Diesel tank. 298 Dollars later we went down the I-19 and eventually turned into a nice rest area for the night.

Those truckers are all victims of the Mexican trucker protest

Afterall there will be another day tomorrow.