Journey to Mazatlán, Day 1

    It's been a really long month. Every day we move things to Goodwill, move things to storage, pack and ship the art we auctioned to fund the trip down. Then do it again the next day. I was starting to hurt all over, and was in awe of Mike's nervous energy that got us through. He NEVER stopped moving and packing. 

    Anyway yesterday morning we had to pack and leave, so I set the alarm for 5am and of course we were up by 4:25am on our own and started moving.

      Once everything was ready we rushed the cat out to the car and he escaped immediately and ran up a tree. We extracted him pretty quickly, though. His carrier was stowed into the back.

Here is Gigi searching for a hiding spot in the car.

      We crossed into Mexico around 11am dodging vendors in the streets through Nogales. Mad, mad driving! Instantly cars were coming towards us from every direction as well as pedestrians. One guy was waving caged parakeets at our vehicle's window to sell (Our cat was probably the only one who would have enjoyed that addition to the car!). This is a roadside chapel near an Oxxo we stopped at. Oxxo is ubiquitous to Mexico. It's like a 7-11 or QT. We stopped whenever we could asNaomi woke up that morning with a stomach bug, in fact tonight she's been puking, poor kid.

         Our border crossing went incredibly smoothly, however. I'd built up extensive anxiety about bringing such a packed car into another country and was only asked a couple questions. Then I forced the man to look at the paperwork I'd gotten for the pets. (It cost us A LOT of money and he was just waving it all off! He kept saying,"No, no, no"). Then we stopped 21 km later at immigration. My second mountain of anxiety I'd built up was washed away. We left on a Friday so immigration would be open and it was all very straightforward. We have our import permit for the car and our 6 month travel visas! Yay!

Around 4pm we rolled into our first airbnb in Hermosillo.

Parking the car was an epic challenge, but we got our car inside diagonally.

Oscar, checking out the patio.

Me, frazzled after an epic day.

     This all seemed like everything went a bit too well so moments after these photos, Oscar managed to injure his dew claw. He ripped his nail and it's hurting him a lot. He bled quite a bit. It all happened while a massive dust storm blew into town, so I ran to the local Oxxo, no bandages, I ran back and all we managed to do was squeeze antibiotic ointment all over it. I found a vet online and I guess we'll head over there tomorrow. We're on a shoe string budget, so fingers crossed this doesn't kill it!

  Anyway he's a very sweet, old dog so we'll do all we can. Our drive tomorrow is a short one anyway.