Mexicooooooo!

Perhaps you recall that last year I visited my friend David down in Mexico for a week. Apparently word spread what a great place it is, and our friends Billy and Kristen joined David in the task of teaching the students at "Las Americas - Esquela por tu grande"... er... something like that. I had also gathered more friends in my world, and so we decided to reunite, as one big family, in the hoppin' town of Parral, Mexico.

Mark, Ryan, Emily, and I put our brains together and figured out that driving down to Parral was going to be more economical than flying down there. So we contacted our inside man over at Enterprise (thanks Curtis), jumped in our discounted Dodge Avenger, and cruised south on interstate 25 to El Paso. The Avenger stayed in El Paso while we boarded the bus for the following leg of our journey. We were warmly greeted by our Mexican friends upon arrival, and settled in for a week of adventures in Mexico.

We filled our days with hiking, tossing the frisbee, eating delicous food, atending church services, celebrating birthdays, and finding stray dogs (more on that last one later). It was a fantastic group of people to spend the week with, as we caught up with each others lives, enjoyed good conversations, and got a better grasp of life in Mexico.

One of the highlights of the trip was hiking to Antenna Hill which is a bluff that overlooks the city. We brought dinner with us and enjoyed watching the sun set over the city and singing worship songs together. I got some sweet pictures too, which naturally included jumping photos. It was a bit of a task attempting to jump in the photo without falling down the cliff.

But he best story from the trip was my birthday present I got the last day we were there. Ryan and I had been talking the last few months about getting a canine companion around the house. We were holding off because of financial reasons. But the last two days in Parall this stray puppy started coming around the school. Ryan jokingly commented on how great it would be to bring this home with us. I completely agreed, but immediately thought of several barriers to this actually happening, and so filed it in my mind under the "not likely to happen" category. But as our time in Mexico drew to a close, we had some conversations that gave us the crazy idea that transporting a dog across the border was quite doable. That spark of hope was all it took for us to feverishly develop a plan to bring this dog home with us.

After some research on the internet, we knew we needed to get the dog to the vet for some shots, before the clinic closed. We contacted the bus company to find out if we could transport an animal with us, and found out she need to be in a cage under the bus with the rest of the cargo. So we had to find a cage, get shots, clean her up and... oh yeah...find this dog. Even if all these things happened we weren't guaranteed they would let her across the border.

I had my birthday party to attend that evening and so I handed over these tasks to Ryan with my blessing and financial backing to make them happen. A few hours later Ryan arrived at my party with an 2 month old puppy in his arms. We named her Redencion (spanish for redemption) but Red for short. We parted ways with our good friends in Parall and headed north with a live souvenir in our posession.
Our final hurdle to jump was the El Paso / Juarez border. It's my understanding this is a notorious border for illegal smuggling and requires a high level of security. I find it strange then, that I've experienced higher levels of security at museums... seriously. All the border security did was inquire what we had in the cage. We told them it was a dog and they asked if we had shot records for her. We said yes... and they let us through. They never looked in the cage, looked at our shot records, or confirmed it was even a dog. So the lesson here is that there are dogs in Mexico free for the taking!

Although Red is a great dog, the trip was really about friends. It was a fantastic time and I'm already looking forward to my trip next year.