ROADTRIP / ISS:01:04.09

V and I had decided that the easiest way to get all of our stuff, as well as ourselves, to Mexico was to load up our car and make the long drive down. For some reason I had always placed any city in Mexico directly under Los Angeles and so I had been mentally preparing myself for a four-day excursion lengthened only slightly by staying with friends that lived in cities along the way. That bubble was burst when V worked out our travel schedule. The length of time he wagered it would take us made me leap to a map only to discover that Puerto Vallarta is halfway into Mexico – roughly the same distance from Vancouver as Toronto. Huh? All of my visions of casually driving up to LA to visit friends and intermittently brush shoulders with the rich and trendy were dashed. I tried to console myself with the idea that the more remote the location the bigger the adventure that awaited and as I got into the car on a bright, cold Vancouver morning I almost believed it.

There is something very reassuring about traveling great distances over long periods of time. You are able to watch the land change, moving from the familiar to the foreign, not in a period of hours as with air travel, but in days. It took us two days to move through Washington and Oregon; countryside that looks identical to that of the Lower Mainland and this gave me just enough time to make peace with what I was leaving behind. The northwest coast is exceptionally beautiful; it’s rainy climate allowing shocking displays of greens and blues. In this part of the world most of your closet is filled with wool and gortex and you deeply appreciate the pleasures enjoyed on a truly hot and sunny day. While I was excited to live in a place that only required me to wear shorts and sundresses I knew I would eventually miss this landscape and made a point to take it in as we slowly headed south.

After awhile there are only so many green fields you can drive through before becoming mind numbingly bored. This is when V and I decided to turn from the countryside sliding beside us and chose instead to turn on each other. I am not exactly sure how large the interior of a Volkswagen Jetta is, but after a few 8-hour days on the road it feels like it’s the approximate size of a matchbox. Combined with the fact that the car was filled to the brim with all of our worldly possessions, forcing both of our seats to be crushed against the dashboard, and you have a recipe for nothing but trouble. We quickly realized that V’s expectations as to how clean the car should be were vastly different from mine. While I am someone who has never agreed with rotting food, I am able to withstand quite a bit of clutter. V was immerging from this experience as a closet neat freak who sternly enforced a car garbage system and could not stand the sound of me eating anything crunchier than a ripe peach. I, on the other hand, expected quite a bit more conversation than he did - the more soul baring the better - but most of my leading questions were met with blank eyes and a strong willed resistance. My terror filled gasps when V accelerated to any speed above 100km/h, no matter how light the traffic, did nothing to endear me to him. On day three, as I was busy pouting about being reprimanded for not cleaning off the top of a Coke can properly, I began contemplating what seemed the only possible outcome of our road trip – my potential life in prison sentence for first-degree murder.

We spent a few days in LA, with a couple named Sophie and Steve, whom I’d known when they lived in Vancouver and who had remained close friends even after they relocated to Los Angeles. When we arrived after another long day of driving Steve helped us unload our car. The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘Why did you guys decide to drive? Soph and I almost killed each other when we drove from Florida to Vancouver. Road trips are a surefire way to end any relationship.’ I nodded at this sage wisdom, a little concerned that we were only halfway to our final destination. Sophie showed up a few hours later, gave us both huge hugs and turned to me whispering, ‘Are you surviving the road trip? Steve and I wanted each other dead when we drove from Florida to Vancouver.’ This did not bode well.

Thankfully things started to look up for V and I after we left LA four days later. We were entering Mexico and the ‘differentness’ of it brought us together as one foreign unit. I had been terrified of crossing the border in Mexico; in the days before we left Vancouver the news had been full of reports of drug shootings in border towns. V had made sure to take us to an exceptionally small crossing just outside of an Arizona town called Ajo, the Spanish word for garlic. We were now in desert country where the sky stretched farther than I had ever imagined, bearing down relentlessly on the dusty earth below.

We crossed the border extremely easily with none of the media hyped corruption or gang violence and spent the day driving as far into northern Mexico as possible. Northwest Mexico is a place that no tourist need ever visit. It is hot, dry, full of large factories and poor rural towns. I had only spent one brief week in Mexico, in Puerto Vallarta, prior to deciding to move there and I was beginning to wonder if I had made a very big mistake. Had I wanted to change my life so badly that I had convinced myself that Mexico was lush and beautiful? As the hours and days crept slowly by there was no change to the dusty Mexican vista outside my window. Not wanting to alarm V that I may have to book a flight home as soon as we got to Puerto Vallarta I kept all my internal angst on the inside for once, falling into hours of silent despair while he drove us deeper into the bowels of what I only could only imagine as hell on earth. I had left the crisp greens and deep blues of British Columbia to live in a rust coloured sandbox where the only things that flourished were cacti and the El Cartel.

Our last stop before we were to reach Puerto Vallarta was Mazatlan. About two hours out of the city the land began to distinctly change character. Gone were the arid sand dunes with the unending highway stretched in front of us - here the land was more fertile. Farms began to look like they could actually support life and every so often an ocean view would surprise us as we rounded a corner on the toll highway. This was the Mexico I had signed up for and the further south we headed the better it got.

The next day we arrived. The sturdy jungle covered mountains that stood proud above Puerto Vallarta’s large ocean bay reminded me of the tropical version of the city we had left only 10 days earlier. Driving into El Centro, the old town, with it’s crumbling and cramped buildings and quaint cobblestone streets I felt as though we had landed in a small European town. We parked outside V’s mother’s house and stretched our cramped limbs, pushing away thoughts of returning home anytime in the near future. I would take on almost anything, if only to avoid another road trip.

PENSANDO / ISS:02:04.09

The morning I decided to quit my job the American economy collapsed.

Needless to say I was nervous about my decision.

I was raised by a mother that had fully embraced the hippie movement. She had quit high-powered positions to travel Europe and work on a kibbutz in Israel. From there she worked in a health food store for almost nothing but the satisfaction of knowing she was attuning herself to a greater cause. Not long before I was born she found God through an East Indian guru and renounced everything her traditional parents stood for. Her message was clear – choose your own truth; she lived this by example and always supported me to do the same.

A tip for future parents: if you want sensible, responsible children then live your life as nonconformist as possible. Make an example of the bohemian lifestyle and your children’s rebellion will be to look at life through a square lens, seeing themselves as the world’s future doctors or lawyers. While my complete lack of mathematic skills and negligent eye for detail prohibited me from entering the aforementioned professions I did manage to pursue the most rational of all artistic fields – graphic design. Unlike my mother, my life was about searching for society’s box and happily jumping inside of it, making sure to shut the lid behind me in case anything unpredictable tried to follow me inside. Sure my life had a few eccentric flourishes, but in the most part it was constructed out of all the experiences one should have to be considered a normal and productive member of western society. No part of society’s box was instructing me to leave it behind in Canada and move to Mexico but for some reason I just couldn’t shake the idea.

When you are raised by someone that trusts that the universe provides, you end up being the worrier in the family. As the news began to roll in about the collapse of capitalism as we knew it I began to have visions, not of living the sweet life in Mexico, but instead of our inevitable slide into Great Depression poverty. Very soon, along with every other middle class North American, V and I would be living hand to mouth. V would learn to play the harmonica and I would make us clothes out of flour sacks. We would finally settle in a cabin we cobbled together out of apple crates and kill wildlife for our daily meals, no longer able to sustain the finicky vegetarian diet both of us had been raised on. Life would be hard - finally our generation was to have its comeuppance - our grandparents sighing ‘we told you so’ from their graves. My dusty hobo inspired imaginings became my constant companions and while everyone was congratulating me on my new life plan I was busy forecasting all the reasons why choosing my own truth was going to lead me straight to disaster.

Free spirit I was not.

I had spent the last four years working at a company that had given me a lot of support and opportunities. I was sad to leave them and they were sad to see me go but no one took it harder than my ‘Big Boss’, the CEO of the company. While I was busy haranguing myself for never learning how to hop a train or barter with bootlegged liquor Big Boss decided to convince me to stay with another form of mental torture – all the things that go wrong to foreigners in Mexico. Now that I am living in Mexico I have often wondered who is in charge of their PR because clearly they are being paid mucho dinero to sabotage their own country. Of course at the time I had no idea that Mexico’s evils were mostly smoke and mirrors and so when Big Boss would drift by my desk with, ‘I hear it’s hurricane season in Mexico. Need more than a big umbrella to survive a mess like that, heh?’ I had only one choice – put my own doom and gloom visions on hold and say with passion and conviction that I knew exactly what I was doing with my life. Right?

As it turned out, all I needed to fully embrace my new adventure was someone more fearful of cracking the lid to society’s box than me. As the days wore on I heard about Mexico’s drug wars, car hijackings, gringo kidnappings, corrupt government officials, even the all too possible death by dengue fever. As Mexico continued it’s daily role in the hot seat I became more and more relaxed, excited almost, each new accusation making me more solid in my decision.

On my final day at work Big Boss waltzed into my office, looked me in the eye and said, ‘Bre, some friends of mine were at a club in Acapulco and a head rolled across the dance floor. A. Human. Head.’

There was nothing more to say than, ‘Big Boss, I love you too.’

That night over dinner my dad raised his wine glass, ‘Here’s to you, my daughter, for finally, after 30 years of living the most sensible of lives, doing something totally and completely random. We couldn’t be more proud of you.’

PENSANDO / ISS:01:04.09

The idea came about on a perfectly lovely August evening while biking home from work – what if we just left it all and moved away? Where we moved to was the least of my concerns, it was the idea of leaving all that I knew for something else that really grabbed me. As I am not one to make flippant decisions of such life changing magnitude while riding a 10-speed bike on a dusty road home it came with a bit of surprise that this particular daydream became a reality. Not just any reality but my reality.

That night I brought it up with my boyfriend, ‘V – you are, very conveniently for us, Mexican. Let’s leave it all and move to Mexico.’

V’s first reaction was to ignore me. He is very rational and understood that I had a good job, lovely friends and a strong connection with my family. Instead of exclaiming with excitement (in both English and Spanish) he calmly continued to chop vegetables for our dinner. The next day he emailed me, ‘I’m calling your bluff baby. I'm not convinced you could actually go through with it.’

This thought had also crossed my mind but as the days went by I could not shake the idea of moving to another country, especially one where I didn’t speak the language and the culture was foreign to me. I had long felt that everyone at some time in their lives should leave their hometown in search of adventure. At 28 I still lived in the city I had been raised in, having moved after university not across the country but across a bridge. Not only that, horrors upon horrors, I only spoke one language. Knowing only English had long been an embarrassment for me. How amazing would it be to respond, ‘My other language is Spanish.’ The fact that I live in Canada where our two national languages are English and French was of little importance to me. Mexico had become my target, my daydream refuge, my brand new life.

And so I quit my job, packed up my apartment and we bought a car for the drive down. Just for good measure I rented some documentaries on the great Mayan pyramids, the Conquistadors bloody successes and the political turmoil that has befallen Mexico ever since.

This I figured was enough to prepare me for my brand new life.