After finally getting the title and registration to the Toyota, I drove down to Klamath Falls Oregon from Salem to see my second family Bea and Sal Florez who are being well-taken care of by a couple in their home. Then took a long boring drive to Las Vegas to see my son Greg. Didn’t wait in Salem for the title to arrive in the mail so my friend Lyn said she would fedex it to Las Vegas while I was there.

When I informed him that the woman who was going to drive down to Oaxaca with me had reneged and that I was driving down alone he had a fit and called his best friend Mike in LA and asked him to please accompany me. We drove to the border at the new shiny Columbia Friendship Crossing 30 minutes north of Loredo Texas. At the crossing I discovered I had a copy of my title and registration but after all the wrangling in Salem I had left the original on the copier glass in the back of the pharmacy in Las Vegas. The friendly border guards mercifully let me through with just the copy! I immediately called Greg and had him go to the pharmacy to see if he could collect my title and registration…maybe somebody had turned them in. Lo and behold, there was the original…after 3 days…still on the glass! So with the help of my iPod and new car speakers we continued down on wide empty expensive toll roads only getting good and lost once after taking a detour through the city of Monterey.

We spent three nice days visiting my friend Patty Gutierrez and her husband Jose in their little casita in San Juan del Rio south of Queretaro…a nice break. We were all invited to dinner in the home of a broiled chicken vendor…their first real contact with American tourists and after being given two clay jars as a gift I was horrified when I dropped one which exploded on the tile floor of the courtyard.

We visited the sacred Rock of Bernal…a UNESCO World Heritage site…the largest North American monolith and the second largest in the world……soaking up the quiet soft vibes. This enormous rock is considered the encounter point between the indigenous communities of the region and the mestizo society that erected the village of Bernal below. Well-known as ‘tonalita’ the volcanic rock, at a height of 288 meters from the base to the peak, became exposed by erosion.

After ending up on a toll road going the wrong way and finding our way back in Mexico City and driving through beautiful rolling mountains back to Oaxaca I was finally “home.”