What a day. Road trips with kids are brutal. Brutal I say! Today was like some sort of crazy twisted episode of The Twilight Zone in which everything that happened last Sunday happened again this Sunday, but with the opposite family members.

I won’t bore with the details of the first few hours of the drive south, I’ll save those for the part where Lowe, not Ouest, threw up all over Ali. All right, nobody needs those details. But seriously, what the hell is going on around here?

Actually I think I figured it out later when I got a chance to ride in the backseat. I felt like I was on a carnival ride. Not an amusement park ride—a carnival ride. Big difference. These cheapo rental cars do not ride like Grandpa’s Cadillac.

Ali had finally had enough puke in the backseat and accepted my offer to drive. Ali never drives. Like, never never. So anyway, she gets behind the wheel, races down the road about three miles and boom—lit up by the Po-Po.

Two cops came up to her window, explained in their most rapid fire Spanish that she’d been speeding. We pled Spanish ignorance at first, but then I got carried away and started questioning them about her actual speed and arguing it in Spanish which seemed to confuse them. Was this guy in the passenger seat lying about not speaking Spanish? How much does he really know? Can he understand what we’re saying to each other right now?

They gave us the line about keeping Ali’s driver’s license until the ticket was paid. So we agreed and asked for the ticket. They backed away, mumbled amongst themselves, then walked back with her license and waved us away.

We are on some roll with the police lately.

A thousand hours after setting out from Mazatlan we arrived back at the boat where one of my automatic bilge pumps was churning away, unable to turn itself off for some reason, inside a dry bilge. Phew.