International Road Trip

For me, an Australian, the concept of driving to another country is pretty bizarre. When you live on an island that is 7,617,930 square kilometres just driving to another city is a major trip. If you cross into another state it’s exciting. Well, acually it’s not that exciting, particularly if you’ve crossed the WA/SA border - there’s nothing as far as the eye can see, and then a sign that says Welcome to SA or WA depending on which way you’re going, and then more nothing as far as the eye can see. In Europe we drove across international borders, in fact, I’ve even snow-skied from one country to another, but there’s no checkpoint or fanfare (and no stamp in your passport!). I imagine it’s pretty ho-hum for the people who live there and do it regularly.

Anyway, tomorrow we are going on a road trip to the US of A which is only a 3 hour drive from where we live. It’s so weird to have to remember to pack my passport when I’m packing the car. Normally I have to be going on a plane to pack my passport. We’ve done this crossing once before and it was the trip from hell. (Almost as bad as the time I flew from UK to Italy for the weekend on 14th September 2001 - utter chaos and the 1 hour flight was delayed by 5 hours on the way there and the way back!)

Last time we drove to the States, we stupidly chose to go on a public holiday in Mexico. Its a pretty common thing for the Mexicans in this area to “pop up” to the States for a few days and a lot of them have family up there, so when a holiday weekend comes along, every man and his chihuahua heads for the border. The queue was enormous! After a 3 hour drive to the border we sat in the queue for another 3 hours. During this time, Guerita managed to watch a movie (thank god for portable DVD players), perfect her “no, gracias” to the millions of people walking up and down the queue selling Mexican knick knacks, and wee in a cup. (Update: no they weren’t selling wee in a cup. That would be special!) With no public toilets in sight and not even any trees by the side of the road (this is the desert, after all) there was no other choice. It was so charming.

To top it all off, when we reached the border, the US officials were confused as to our visa requirements. I guess they are not used to “Third Country Nationals” crossing over, if you’re not American or Mexican they are not quite sure what to do with you. So, another hour in the office trying to explain that we normally get a visa waiver when we fly in, so why not now? They let us in eventually, but advised us we should probably get a visa for next time, since we live in Mexico. They were also pretty suspicious of my 7 month pregnant belly at the time, wondering if I was maybe planning on staying in the US to have myself an anchor baby? So what should have taken 5 hours from our house to the US city we were visiting became a 9 hour trip - not a pleasant experience.

This time we are more prepared. We have our visas, although every single person and website we have consulted about whether we actually need this visa says something different - 2 different US government websites say different things and even 2 officials at our local consulate say different things. So what’s the bet this time we get a border guard who says “You don’t need a visa, you’re Australian”! But we’re going mid-week without a holiday in sight, so hopefully we’ll make it through with our sanity in tact.

At least we’ll have a stamp in our passport to show for it.