Big daddy

On Tuesday of my trip to Mexico, I did something that I had never done in my 4 previous trips. {pause for dramatic effect} It all started Monday night. One of the sponsors received some bad news about a couple of friends of hers. Without getting into any details, the short story is that she had to return to the US. Now thanks to some sweet new border laws, you have to have a passport to fly into the US. So because this lady did not have one, we had to drive her back to the border. I volunteered to go with Dave to take her back and keep him awake on the drive. He accepted my offer and it was set that we would leave at 5:00 am Tuesday morning. The plan was to drive up, get her a rental car and head straight back, returning to camp about 1:00 pm.

The drive to the border was good. We chatted about stuff (and anyone who has chatted with Dave knows that this is good) and drove. We made pretty good time to the border. About 45 min from the border we began making calls to try to find a rental car or plane ticket to get our fellow traveler back home. We called everyone we could in Eagle Pass (the US side of the border where we cross) and we found nothing. We stopped at Colegio Biblico and used their phones and phonebooks to continue our search. The local rental car place had no one-way cars for rent and there are no real flights from Eagle Pass to anywhere. There was a bus but it didn't leave until late in the afternoon. So we began calling around to other cities in the area. Finally I located a rental car in Del Rio, about an hour away. I confirmed that they would keep the car and of we sped up the border. One cool benefit of being back in the good ol' USA is that my cell phone worked again. I was able to call Angela and she sent me some awesome pictures of Braden. This was perhaps the best part of the trip to Texas! We arrived in Del Rio and were able to get our friend on her way.

Since we were in the States, Dave decided it would be a good time to check on some vehicle parts to repair his turn signals. We went to O'Reilly's and the dealership, but no one could really help us much (by this I mean, they wanted us to take off the steering collum and we didn't want to). So we headed back down to Eagle Pass on the return trip. Needless to say, this little side trip to Del Rio added a significant amount of time to our estimated time of return.

We had also planned to go to Wal-Mart while in Eagle Pass to get some food and supplies we needed back at the camp. So we stopped in for a quick shoping spree. We divided the list and agreed to meet back at the registers ASAP. I was in charge of the food items. I went searching for these items only to find that I was in the worst stocked Wal-Mart in the world. It was bad (apparently Dave had a similar experience). I felt like I was in a K-Mart or something. Anyways, I finally scraped together things similar to what was on my list and returned to check out. Dave and I got out of there. We then went to Whattaburger to grab some lunch before heading back into Mexico. I've got to say, Whattaburger has some pretty tasty burgers, can't say much for the fries though.

We got back on the road and returned to camp without incident (except Dave getting out of the van to relieve himself in the middle of the desert).

Praise God.