Memo's words from the border....

Taxi crew has arrived safely in San Miguel de Allende! Stories from the border are best when delivered first hand:

Current city, San Miguel De Allende, Mexico. Yesterday Ed Adams and I flew to Texas, picked up the Alfa Taxi race car and bright and early this morning joined a convoy of other American racers headed south of the border. The procedure for crossing the border in theory is pretty simple. Get your ass a tourist card across the border, check. Get an import permit for the tow vehicle, check. Get an import permit for the race car....uh, yeah. Problems prevented us from getting the race car permit in the mail on time before we left so we arrived hoping that one of the crew at home could overnight it to us when it arrived. Unfortunately, the convoy was leaving and still no permits. Time to improvise. Seriously if there isn´t already a word for stress induced diarhea there should be like anxiarhea. At 8 am the convoy headed for the border. There would be two check points we had to pass. One right at the border and one 15 miles in, both for customs and immigration purposes. We hoped we would just get waived through as we had in previous years. As we approached the first check point, we all cued up in line and the convoy leader, Gerie Bledsoe, got out of his truck and walked back telling everyone that they were checking import permits. Yeah, that´s not good. So we rolled up to ba ooth with a gate and a red and green light. Green light means you roll through no problem. The red light flashes and a guy with a big gun points us to pull over to the side for inspection. Initially, there are three guys inspecting all the trucks and race cars, checking VINs and clearly being thorough. But then suddenly two guys vanished leaving one border agent to fend for himself. He quickly took care of the truck next to me but then instead of coming to me he went to another truck in the lane to my right. I looked at Ed and we both had the same thought: bolt. So we pulled out and ran the check point. No gun fire, no spike strips we just disappeared into Nuevo Laredo and summarily got lost. A few broken spanish conversations later and we were back on course. At the second check point they just inspected my passport, admired the race car,"Alfa Romero!", and let us through. Crisis averted. So we drove about 550 miles to San Miguel, which is a beautiful 500 year old spanish town, and enjoyed the relative calm that is the driving experience on Mexican highways, knowing that we just got really lucky.

-Bill



TaxiCrew reporting...

Location:San Miguel de Allende