Day Eleven, North of the Border

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We leave Guadalajara around 8:30AM and drive.
We drive and drive. And drive some more.
The scenery is nice: flat and open, some mountains in the distance. Cell phone coverage gets better as we continue moving further north. The rest stops on the tollway get nicer. There are Subway sandwich shops and 7-11's. Some of the toll booths even take US Dollars.
There are mountains as we approach Saltillo and Monterrey and the roads get curvy (the sign in Spanish describes them as sinuosa, a cool word I think). The highway here gets very windy, there are dust devils. I don't know what they are now--Dave tells me later--but it's pretty wild to see the wind kicking up huge plumes of dust at the foot of the mountains in the distance. The wind shakes the van. Have to turn the music up to hear it.

During the trip we pass through the Tropic of Cancer, there is a sign. That is pretty neat. I mark it on the GPS.

I decide to take the bypass and avoid the border bridges that connect Nuevo Laredo, Mexico with Laredo, TX, USA. It adds some miles to the trip but the crossing itself takes less than 5 minutes for the both of us. We don't even have to pass through Mexican emigration--they are closed.
US Customs is professional and efficient, just as you'd expect. I answer questions to one agent as 3 or 4 other agents and a dog open all the doors on the van and sift through my stuff. They peek in bags and suitcases but nothing is pulled out and opened. I guess it helps to be traveling on an official passport, have a military ID and be returning from an Embassy tour. I can't help but wonder if the average traveler has to endure a check that is much stricter and thorough. Or perhaps it was because it was already about 8PM and there were no other vehicles at this crossing besides us. Either way, we were tired and I was glad that it didn't take any longer than it did. We're in a hurry to get to a restaurant for dinner and a hotel for some sleep.

For those keeping score at home: we drove 720 miles today and the trip odometer now reads 2425.

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