22.9.-5.10.2008: Oklahoma - Texas - Corpus Christi - Tamasopo We drove south west through Missouri and into Oklahoma where we took photos of the sign on the freeway announcing Checotah's claim to fame - the birthplace of Carrie Underwood, American Idol 2005. We drove into northern Texas and stopped at a very helpful welcome centre. The lady obviously knew exactly what we needed and we left with maps and brochures marked with the best route south and what we needed to see on the way. Very efficient! Journeying south we hit heavy traffic getting around Dallas and went to Corpus Christi. We went to take a look at the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier that got hit by a kamikaze Japanese airplane in 1944 and the first time we have set foot on such a vessel. We stopped at Mustang Island for lunch and then got the free ferry back across the water to Portland. It was quite a long and exhausting day which we finished off by spending well over $100 at Wal-Mart as we would be going into Mexico for the next 6 months where we have found that tinned tomatoes, black tea bags and Jell-O cheesecake mixes are difficult to find!! (Don't laugh too much at our hardship!) We stayed for three nights on a campground in southern Texas to make phone calls organizing vehicle insurance, Mexico insurance and renewing our Triple A membership. We also had to pick up our post and needed to exchange some books. We stayed in Brownsville at a Wal-Mart for our last night in the US and bought an 11 litre can that we found a way of attaching to our sewer outlet so that we can dispose of our waste water by hand rather than having to find a dump station. We know that our first stop in Mexico will be Tamasopo to meet up with our friends Suzanne and Bob. The idyllic campground there doesn't have a dump station and the nearest one is over 40 miles away which means we can't stay any longer than about 9 days without having to drive away to dump. This new system has only taken us 5 years to come up with! Sometimes we wonder if we left our brains behind when we decided to go travelling! When we got to the border the first thing we have to do is to go to the US immigration offices to hand in our green form. We were asked to sit down and wait for an officer. One came out with a piece of paper in his hand and said he needed to talk to us about something. We thought there must be some kind of problem but he only wanted to tell us of the new rules coming in on January 11th next year. As from that date we will have to apply online to get approval to enter the US five days before we intend to cross the border. We will have to name where we cross the border and the date. If approved we will be sent confirmation which we will have to print out and hand in at the border. Sounds like it will be far easier for us to cross in the future but it means we will have to find internet access 5 days before and we will then have to wait for confirmation and find somewhere to print it out. Then there will be a mad dash to get to the border when we said we would be there. Do they know how old Winnie is and that we never know when we could get a problem that would cause us a delay?? Well we will find out next April how it works out! It didn't take us long to get through the formalities on the Mexican side and we also changed some dollars into Pesos. Then we got stopped by the Mexican police. We thought he had stopped us for nearly running over a cyclist when we turned into a supermarket car park. But apparently it was for stopping at a red light that we aren't supposed to stop at!! The officer had difficulty explaining to us why we should not have stopped and let us go. Or maybe it was because he found out we are Europeans. Who knows? The mind boggles! At any rate we were relieved and happily went to do some shopping! We drove south that day and the next and arrived at Tamasopo on Sunday. The road out to the campground was quite bad and it took us some time to get to the campground. Suzanne had written us a letter to the owner which we had printed out. It said we were their good friends and maybe he could give us a discount. But he said we could stay there for free. So now we felt guilty for giving him the note in the first place. We'll have to wait for Suzanne and Bob to get here next week and try to get something sorted out. In the meantime we will enjoy our little piece of paradise for a while!