“Hola, buenos días. We would like to buy a ticket for the ferry.” “Do you have a reservation?” “Excuse me, a what?” “A reservation.” “But you can’t do that, we tried in La Paz” “Well we do that here. If you do not have a reservation you will have to wait to see if there will be room. Come back at 1:00.” Well. Ahem. And so we sit in the parking lot for two hours. It’s not too hot out, but of course with all the trucks it’s noisy and smelly.

S-O-C-K-S.

1PM arrives. We walk over to the office. No one there. A few people milling about. Around 2, two ladies show up. They were at lunch. Um, ok. “We are back! Ola!” “You will still have to wait.” “How long?” Shrug.

And so we wait. And wait. And wait. 3:00 comes. “How much longer?” “I don’t know maybe 4:00, maybe 5:00.”

S-O-C-K-S.

It is becoming clear as they are now loading the ferry, that our trip really depends on whether they have room when they finish loading everyone else. 4:00. 5:00. 6:00. 7:00.

Dark out now. Been here more than 8 hours. The checkin crew has gone home, the parking lot is empty. There are a handful of guys standing around. We are all, apparently, “The Unreserved.” A sad lot.

The lady comes out and gives pieces of paper to the guys. Paula asks what is going on. A trucker guy says “we get to go!” As he runs to his truck. But no one has given us anything. The trucker guy says “You too! Go get a paper!”

So Paula goes in and talks to the lady. “Oh, ok here you go. Hurry, hurry!” So we start to scramble to the van.

Lady stops. In Spanish, yelling and hard to hear because she is speaking fast and there are loud trucks: “wait! Somethingspanishsomething DOG somethingspanishsomething BELOW DECK something CAGE something NO!” “What!?!” “GO AROUND THERE!” Much arm waving and pointing. We are now the last vehicle in the lot. It is dark. The ferry is a couple hundred yards in the distance.

So we hop in the van and GO! around the corner. There is a military checkpoint. About 10 guys swarm around the van. “Get out”. And so we do. They speak no English and are using Google Translate. “Write your names in this form” And so I do as they crawl around and in the van for a few minutes. They are not quite sure what to make of our license plate TVANREX. I hope I do not have to explain naming our van “Tyvanosaurus rex” to a Mexican military security guy.

“OK GO! Hurry!”

We hop in and drive over to load in. We are stopped by a dock worker who has some English. “Boleto?” (Ticket). We show him the slip of paper. “No, that’s not it. You need to pay.” “Where? How? This is all they gave us.” “You had to go through the security check before paying. Go back to the office and pay.” “The one way back there?” “Yes, one stay here with car, one goes to pay.” And so off goes Paula sprinting the couple hundred yards back to the office.

She returns with the ticket. “Ok turn around and back in, up the ramp.” The door to the top deck (where we were before) is closed, the ramp leads us into the lower belly of the ship. We are motioned in and I back into place. Inches on either side. It’s almost 8PM.

But now what? No one else mentioned the dog, cage, anything. We don’t know if we can stay with the vehicle. What was all that yelling about?

Paula gets out and stops a dock worker. “Can we stay in our van? We have a dog.” “Oh, yes. But you probably don’t want to. It will be quite hot and stuffy and loud and smelly with fumes.” Oh, yay. It’s pretty bad already. “Can we run our generator?” (Air conditioner!) “Oh, sure.” Yikes.

One last worker backs his truck in front of us--we indeed were the last customer on the ship. The huge ramp door rises with flashing lights and klaxons blaring. The workers go topside.

We are in the belly of the beast. The engines begin to roar.

And away we go. It is fairly awful with the heat, but the smell, while ever present, is tolerable. There is ventilation of a sort. The van vibrates with the THRUM THRUM THRUM THRUM of the engines and they are LOUD. So we start our generator and crank some AC. That helps a lot. Noise cancelling headphones help a lot. No internets of course so we snack and read books.

But it ain’t great. A fitful night of stopping and starting the generator, and not really sleeping much. We took some Dramamine but it turns out the Sea of Cortez is pretty calm actually so the movement of the ship isn’t a problem. (We had spoken to someone earlier that did this on a bad day with a van and he said it was awful and the semis were rocking back and forth and, well . . . Glad that’s not us.)

Of course we can’t see a thing. The only way to know when we arrive is that dock workers start to show up and unchain trucks from the deck. Turns out that started around 10:50AM. About 14 hours at sea.

And being at the door we were out by 11:00! Yay, right? Umm . . .

First stop: Marina police check. Photos taken of vehicle and serial number. “OK, go.” Second stop: Agriculture department. Pesticide treatment. 40 pesos, here’s your receipt, roll up windows while we spray your car. Spraysprayspray. Third stop: Port Authority tax guy. 250 pesos. Official! Wait here, sorry. Given stamped receipt. Fourth stop: National Guard. “Where were you? Where are you going? Vacation? Let me look inside.” A brief look inside. “OK. You can go.”

And we are FREE!! On BAJA!! Whee! Air! Sky! Sun! Beer! Back to the beach!

S-O-C-K-S.