Border crossing!

We're heading to Guaymas. Feeling great!

Damn. There must be another way into Mexico.

The Rattlevan in a rare, non-rattly moment in the Arizona desert

A couple of faux-bos chillin' in a parking lot.

Oh yeah - The Plan

The current plan, (and it's a loose one) is to head through Mexico and into Belize. We'll hang out there for a while and plan the rest of the border crossings into Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The planning is tricky because of Lena. Because she's a non-human animal and doesn't possess a passport, and in the eyes of certain governments may instead possess rabies, distemper, parvo and all manner of worms and other parasites, she's quite a pain to get across borders. She has much more paperwork than either of us or the rattlevan. I tried to make her do all of the research but she kept getting distracted and clicking on cute videos of squirrels on youtube.

Tucson

I wanted my first blog post to be a picture of our rattlevan parked in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Riverside, California. The photo would be captioned "Auspicious Beginnings" and would, I thought, be perfect. But trees blocked my view of the big blue letters from our parking spot, and Chuck and I drew the line at moving the rattlevan to a better location just for a photo-op. So that moment came and went, a few days ago, and the blog stayed empty.

Even now, it seems too soon to start this thing up, seems like it should be postponed until something actually happens (aside from lovely desert driving and camping).

But, because friends/family/acquaintances have expressed a certain unease with our road trip, and because I've got a little time to kill while waiting for the brake shop to open tomorrow morning for a final checkup on the rattlevan, I'm going to make this -- a post written in a Tucson cafe called, excellently, Cartel -- be my first.

Welcome. This is going to be fun.