The joys of travel

San Diego, California, USA

Work on the boat projects has been grinding to a halt, mostly due to the difficulties of finding parts in Mexico.  With this in mind, we decided to head to San Diego on a shopping trip.  Instead of the grueling 16-hour marathon bus ride we did last year, from Santa Rosalia to Tijuana, this time we were looking forward to a fast ride, by air from La Paz to Tijuana, followed with a quick and easy bus ride over the border and into San Diego.  We booked the same hotel we had used last year, the Sofia, partly because the greyhound station is right next door, making it super convenient..

On Friday, we buttoned up the boat and took the short taxi ride to the La Paz airport.  The departure lounge was gloriously air-conditioned and the flight left right on time, leaving at 2:30 PM.  The journey was off to a perfect start.  We were in Tijuana by about 4:20 PM.  This turned into 3:20 PM because of the one hour time zone change.

Bus station at Tijuana airport

When we arrived in Tijuana, we thought about trying a different shuttle service to San Diego.  Last year, when we used Greyhound for a similar border crossing, we were less than impressed, but the fact that they would take us right to our hotel was just too hard to pass up.  The competition would have let us off at the Santa Fe train station in San Diego, about 5 blocks from the hotel.

The greyhound bus turned out to be a mini-bus, seating about 18 people in mini-comfort.  We left the airport at 4:30 PM.  Ten minutes later we were stopped somewhere along the busy highway, where our driver grabbed all his stuff and ran across 6 lanes of traffic to a similar bus stopped on the other side, while simultaneously the other driver sprinted over to our bus, got in, and we continued on our merry way to the border.

The wait at the border was even worse than we had encountered last year, possibly because it was Friday afternoon.  It took a full 2-1/2 hours to creep along the 100 yards of the bus lane.  Two of our fellow passengers gave up after the first hour, hoping to find a better deal somewhere else I guess.  This left us with a total of 4 extra seats on the bus which, as we got close to the actual border, our industrious driver sold to some enterprising people who wanted to skip the wait in the walk-over line (there were reportedly over 1500 people in that line at the time).

True to form, once we got across the border to San Ysidro, Greyhound informed us that we now had to wait for another 1/2 hour for a different bus to take us the rest of the way into San Diego.  It was quite a shock after the heat in La Paz to find ourselves actually wanting a jacket as the sun went down.  For a few minutes, we considered just grabbing the trolley from here, which would take us about a block from our hotel, but we figured we had already paid for this shuttle so we sat and watched the trolleys come and go.

Once on the bus, a regular big Greyhound bus this time, we were quickly whisked the 10 or 15 miles to the brand new Greyhound terminal in San Diego, nowhere near our hotel.  Since we found ourselves near Petco Park (the baseball stadium) there was a nearby trolley station, where we were able to grab a trolley (the same trolley that we could have taken from the border) that had a stop a block from our hotel.  Unfortunately, the station by our hotel was under construction and we had to stay on until we got the the next one, at the Santa Fe train station, where we walked the remaining 5 blocks back to our hotel.

But there was a rainbow at the end of this storm,  The hotel was unable to supply the room we had booked on Expedia and gave us a free upgrade to a great corner room on the top floor, boasting an actual view of something other than a parking lot.  We were in our room at exactly 9 PM.  Not bad - only 4-1/2 hours to cover the 20 miles from the Tijuana airport to downtown San Diego.

You have to love international travel!

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