It definitely wasn’t easy but we made it!  With our truck and our trailer and our giant assortment of tools and ladders – we made it.  We had 4 main tasks – to import the:

1. Trailer
2. Truck
3. Tools
4. Ladders

We spent weeks researching the process and preparing the documentation and finally made a run for the border.  I am not going to tell all the details – it would take more pages than you would ever want to read.  Let me just say that every one of those items had some type of major challenge or incident – it took 2 full days and one sketchy night in Nogales to get it all done.  But it is done and our trailer is now Mexican and filled with Mexican tools and ladders.  Our truck is temporarily Mexican – it can stay for 6 months.  And we are in Bucerias.  The drive itself was beautiful but not easy hauling a heavy load – many mountains in Colorado and New Mexico and in various states in Mexico.  We spent many hours on the verge of overheating as we climbed mountains.  We have one smashed in truck back corner thanks to a run in with a concrete divider as we tried to get out of a customs line that we didn’t mean to be in.  Our GPS took us on a couple of impossibly narrow streets and down one completely washed out road near Tepic.  We had one scammer at a gas station rip our windshield wiper and then insist we had to pay him $650 pesos for new ones – and since it was about to rain we had no choice.  We have 2 new cracks in the windshield.  We did not see a white face for 3 days and most of the places we stopped did not have an English speaker so we had to bungle through with our crappy Spanish.  We were stopped once at some type of inspection point but both my Spanish our paperwork got us through. The roads were so bumpy that my FitBit interpreted all the movement as me taking over 15,000 steps a day while I sat on my butt.

At the Border

But we met amazingly kind people all along the way.  People in small towns stopped to watch our big rig go by – children waving, old men smiling.  Hotel managers who worked hard to find a safe place to park at night and security guards who promised to keep our stuff safe.   It was a week we will never forget, but we are more than happy to be sleeping in our bed in Bucerias tonight.  As we came around the corner from Sayulita heading into Bucerias, we both just grinned.  It felt like home – it felt right!  WE MADE IT!