Taking the bus from Guadalajara

Mechas and I celebrate her arrival in Bucerias.

During the long evening I’d been in contact with Mechas’ husband, Greg, a couple of times. He’d call me and say, “Mechas is in Guadalajara but she’s thinking of taking a bus to Puerto Vallarta.” It was very late in the evening and his wife was stranded in Guadalajara and thinking of taking a four-hour bus ride on some fairly nasty Mexican roads in the middle of the night but he was calm about the whole thing.

“The battery on her cell phone is dying,” he said, “so we can only text each other. And I’m not sure what sort of reception she’ll get once she’s on the bus.”

I told him to make sure she didn’t go all the way into Puerto Vallarta on the bus. If she did, it would take me another hour to get to her. “Tell her to get off at Bucerias Centro.”

“It’s a direct bus,” Greg said. “I don’t think they make stops.”

“Then she’ll have to talk the bus driver into it,” I said. “But it’s very important that he drops her off at Bucerias Centro.”

The way we left it was that Greg would call me when he got a text from Mechas saying she was in Bucerias and then I would go look for her. This was around midnight.

I sat there on the balcony looking out over the dark Bay of Banderas. The more I thought about things the more I thought this was a recipe for disaster. What if the bus driver wouldn’t stop in Bucerias? And even if he did, what was she to do? It’s not like there would be some place warm and well lit for her to wait for me. She’d just be standing on the side of the road, her suitcase in hand. Her and the borrachos. I couldn’t understand how Greg could be so calm about all this. Obviously he knew his wife better than I did, but if it was me, I’d be nervous as hell.

A little before one Greg called. “She’s there,” he said.

“In Bucerias?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where?”

“I’m not sure. She says there’s a big white building across the street from her.”

Great. There are a lot of big white buildings in Bucerias.

I got in the car and hurried down the highway to Bucerias. The town was dark. I took the lateral road that turned off into the center of town and slowed down, looking for her on both sides of the road but all I saw were the taxi drivers who huddle together on the median in the road playing cards. I tried to think of where the bus driver might have let her off, where it would have been easy for him to stop, but my mind was a blank and so I told myself that I would drive the lateral road through town and turn down every side street until I found her. I got to the plaza and made a u-turn and headed back for the highway. Out of the shadows of the ficus trees lining the street came a tiny wisp of a woman carrying some luggage. It was Mechas.

“The taxi drivers offered to give me a lift for free,” she said when she climbed into my car, “but I told them someone was coming for me. I don’t think they believed it.”

She was tired but not particularly frazzled by her adventures. Certainly not as frazzled as I was. She told me how she’d organized a group of other stranded travelers in Guadalajara and rented a van to get them to the bus station and then how she’d persuaded the ticket seller to sell her a discounted ticket so that she only ended up paying something like $20 for a four-hour bus trip and how she then had to talk the driver into stopping in Bucerias because they weren’t supposed to do that. “It helps that I can speak Spanish,” she said. That had to be the understatement of the evening.

Like I had for Signe, I made Mechas a large cocktail and then sent her off to bed. The last thing I did before going to bed myself was send a text to Chris Fletcher: “The eagles have landed.”

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