Drive It Like You Stole It

After reconfirming with the family that we weren’t getting together for Mother’s Day, I decided to drive 200 miles south to where one of my friends was doing an out-of-town rotation. Let me just preface this story with the fact that the last two road trips we have done together have involved speeding tickets for her. Prior to this weekend, I had never been pulled over. Ever.

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It had been over a month since our last desert hike, so we headed to a nearby mountain to check it out. This was the sign at the entrance:

Instead of following a trail to who-knows-where, we decided to play it safe and walk up along a dirt road… for three miles… entirely uphill. Luckily, for once we started in the morning, so only the downhill portion was in the noonday sun.

Let me just say that on Monday it hurt just to sit in my car and drive home.

The entire time that we walked there were birds that kept circling overhead. We kept joking about them being vultures, but now I can see that they definitely were not. I guess I should have paid more attention to all the times my father has talked about classifying birds. Hawks, maybe? I don’t know.

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And just in case you want to know what improvements have been made in securing our country’s borders, I’ll have you know that the US Border Patrol is now watching from the skies with bright, white blimps.

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After cleaning up at her place, we headed out to one of the local wineries. It happens to be very close to Mexico. I had never done wine-tasting before, so I have nothing to compare it to, but they gave us fifteen different types to taste! After walking around for a bit, I drove my friend’s Firebird back towards town. Unfortunately, I handed her my digital camera, and most of the pictures she took look something like this…

…but she did manage to take a few nice shots.

When we were about a half-hour from town, I looked in the rearview mirror to see flashing lights. Uh-oh—but I was only doing 55 mph, and my friend had long since stopped taking pictures, so what was the problem? I pulled to the right, and this 18 year-old kid walked up to the window.

The first thing out of his mouth was, “Why are you parked in the middle of the road?”

To which I fired back, “Dude, there’s no shoulder here,” and pointed to the weeds. For future reference, I wouldn’t suggest addressing an officer with dude, but luckily once stopped, I saw that he was a Border Patrol agent.

“Are you two US citizens?”

Is he kidding? I’m a glow-in-the-dark strawberry blonde and my friend is of the pasty-variety as well. “Um, do you want to see some ID?”

“No, but could you pop the trunk?” There’s not exactly a whole lot of space to stash people or drugs in a Firebird but ok, let’s just pretend like he had any reason to pull us over.

At this point, my co-pilot pipes in, “Those are the T-tops in the back, just in case you don’t know what they are.” Fabulous, so now not only have I called him “Dude” but we’re openly questioning his intelligence.

He lets us go, and we drive off mystified as to why we were ever pulled over to begin with. Everyone so far has opined that he was just bored and wanted to stop two women in a sports car.

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The next morning, we actually did go to Mexico, if only briefly to check out the cost of prescription medications. And, while you can buy pretty much anything (well, not Botox!), most of the stuff ended up being cheaper at home with insurance coverage. However, I’m pretty sure we’re probably the only people to walk into pharmacies there with a PDA in hand, ready to price-compare. We ended up haggling on some blankets and calling it a morning.