To Reynosa

When I was living in Baton Rouge, my friend Irene and I drove down the east coast of Texas to visit her ex-boyfriend Lee's parents.  On the way, we stopped in Freeport to see my friend Madeline's two aunts who owned a wonderful little Mexican restaurant.  We also overnighted at the Holiday Inn in Corpus Christi (in the parking lot, a sort of shelter-in-place if you will, in the car).
After our brief introduction to Corpus Christi, we continued to South Padre Island.  I was astonished to find a collection of cars and campers on the beach.  We did indeed join them, after a brief foray to the bay where we found a guy who basically lived there.
What was notable on the oceanside was a rented Winnebago (no infringement of copyright intended, but it was indeed a Winnebago) full of Minnasotian snowbirds who did not have the sense to remove themselves from the rooftop where they were baking their sunburns into a crisp.
From Lee's parents, Irene and I parked the car-- which was full of sand, pot burns, and remains of marijuana smoking and beer guzzling-- at the shoe store parking lot in McAllen.  This was where all the hippies left their cars in order to walk over the border to Reynosa on the Mexican side.  To our credit, we also had the sense to leave our blue jeans and our shorts in our duffelbags and donned sensible but hot corduroy pants for our stroll.
Once across, the sight of taxi cabs driven much as their counterpart in New York City are reassured me.  The little beggar kids who followed us imploring us to buy a wooden salad fork and spoon for our americanos dolares were a new experience for me.  We stood in the hot sun drinking a Tecate apiece.  Cervesa in Mexico was allowed to have twice the alcohol content that the equivalent in Texas was, so that was a big deal to us.  Then we went off and bought the vegetables from the street stand that Lee's parents had requested us to purchase for dinner.


http://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/Analyst-Desktop-Binder-REDACTED.pdf