Fear And Loathing On The Way To Mexico

A True Story . . .

. . . only the names have been changed to protect the identity of the other two idiots.

Bob, Lester, and I were enjoying beers one night when Bob announced he’d just gotten his pilot’s license. So naturally, we wanted to fly somewhere.

“How about Mexico?” Lester suggested.

“Tomorrow morning!!” we all agreed.

We weren’t blowing smoke about that.

We rendezvoused the next morning at a tiny landing strip in Oregon.

Bob’s plane was a Piper Tri-Pacer. Technically, a PA-22. A single-engine prop plane.

It had been manufactured in 1953, the same year Sir Edmond Hillary was the first to ascend Mount Everest, Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel, Playboy’s inaugural issue showed lots of Marilyn Monroe, and Westinghouse introduced the color teevee for $1250. (That 1976 $1250 would be $5670 in today’s dollars!)

The Piper was described as having a “classic fiber finish” In other words, it was a cloth-covered plane. Abbott’s Piper was nicely accented with duct tape, covering all the rips and tears in its classic fiber finish.

Simply put, it was old.

There were three of us in the tiny plane. “No problem,” Bob assured us.

But Lester ended in the back seat which wasn’t a backseat since it was a two-passenger plane. The ‘back seat’ was designed to hold the stuff of the two passengers in the front seats. But in our case, it held my stuff, Bob’s stuff, Lester’s stuff . . . and Lester.

After takeoff, Bob explained how our air travel would work. Turned out Bob wasn’t instrument rated, so we’d be flying VFR, visual flight. In other words, we’d be navigating via road maps.

My job was to hold the road map, look out the window, and tell Bob where we were.

So, on the first leg, I looked down on I-5 which we were tracking. Our cruising speed was 120 knots, so we weren’t traveling all that much faster than earthbound cars on the freeway.

When we approached the Siskiyou Mountains on the Oregon-California border, Lester stuck his head out from under all our junk in the “back seat”.

He said, “You know, like that big thing right in front of us? The mountain with all the trees? Maybe we should gain a little altitude?”

To which Bob replied, “We’re overweight. We’ll get lift when we get closer, it’ll carry us over.”

Fortunately, it did.

Our next excellent adventure came while flying over Lake Havasu in Arizona.

Bob said he wanted to take a nap. “Take over, Jeff.”

A nap??

I explained I didn’t know how to fly. “Easy”, Bob said. “Just keep an eye on the gyroscope and the altimeter. Just a short nappy, I’ll be awake by the time we clear water and hit land again.”

And with that Bob was lights out and snoring.

And it was easy. And fun. At least until the engine conked out.

Oh, swell. We were all going to die.

“Bob! Lester!! No engine! We got no engine!”

Bob ‘woke up’ laughing. “We’re out of gas. Two fuel tanks. Have to switch to the other.”

Quite the jokester, that Bob.

And then there was the Tucson airport. That would be the Tucson International Airport. Our first day’s goal had been to reach Nogales, on the Arizona-Mexico border. But we weren’t going to have enough fuel to make it. So out came another roadmap, and we diverted east to Tucson, a shorter trip. We figured the airport should be easy to spot. It was, but the air traffic controller denied us permission to land.

Probably on the grounds that we were imbeciles.

Bob finally convinced the tower that we had to land because we were out of fuel.

They granted us a distress landing and told us to land on runway whatever-it-was. Then the tower told another plane they should follow 8941 Charlie (that was us) and to slow to 150 knots. 150 knots?? Geez, we were probably at about 50 knots. To put that into mph, the Boeing, or whatever it was, was traveling about 120 mph faster than we were.

I was glad our little plane didn’t have a rearview mirror.

Anyway, we landed without getting rear-ended.

And we needed beer.

We hit the town that night and chased girls, something we were spectacularly unsuccessful at.

It might have been Lester’s leisure suit.

We were all a bit foggy the next morning, what with the beer and the spirited rejection of every female in Tucson.

And here I must admit that our next travel blunder was on me. The previous day I’d nailed our route from Nogales to Puerto Vallarta.

But we weren’t in Nogales.

We were in Tucson.

And among my pile of roadmaps, I couldn’t find a highway with a Tucson to Nogales route. So we just looked down and started following a highway that seemed to be heading toward Nogales. Turns out it was heading toward El Paso, Texas. Southeast. We needed to be going southwest.

Hey, no problem. We just compassed our way southwest, into Mexico. I looked out the window for a road to follow. Not much to follow, but at least we were heading generally in the right direction.

We didn’t want to end up with another low fuel situation, so when we spotted a tiny landing strip we put down. The airport, if you could call it that, consisted of an office the size of an outhouse and three little cabins. We landed, fueled up, and checked into one of the cabins.

Nearby was a cantina, so naturally, we had to investigate.

I had no idea where all the people came from.

From the air, we had seen no towns or villages nearby.

But the cantina was packed. And festive.

We were greeted cordially as if we were friendly Martians. Muchas cervezas!

The next morning we were a wee bit wobbly and it was late morning before we woke up and crammed ourselves into the Piper.

But take-off was a notable failure.

Hot air.

It was pushing noon on a scorching central Mexico day and we couldn’t get lift. We bounced off the end of the runway, taxied back, and resigned ourselves to spending another night in wherever-we-were.

We stayed another night, avoided the cantina, and successfully took off the next morning. Our new strategy was to just fly due west until we reached that big blue thing, the Pacific Ocean. Then we’d turn left, hug the coast, and figured sooner or later we’d find Puerto Vallarta.

Puerto Vallarta was great, well worth the adventurous trip. We also flew to many other, non-touristy towns.

And it wasn’t long before I was overcome by a ‘sense of place’. I felt like I belonged in Mexico, among the Mexican people, that Mexico was meant to be my true ‘home’.

Years later I moved to Mexico.

It is indeed where I belong.

It is home.