The Popes: The Never-Ending Nightmare

3.21.14

The Trip to Acapulco

I'm sure Caleb could write this better than I but since you are all dying to know what happened, this will have to do.

Let's start at the beginning. My parents are in town and we wanted to take them to Acapulco. It's a 4 hour drive from here. We'd talked to lots of people at church who have gone for weekend trips and loved it. So Caleb took off work on Friday and we left the apartment at 9am. Not 2 minutes away from our apartment we get pulled over by a cop. She said we couldn't drive before 11 (never heard that one before) and told us she would tow our car unless there was something else we could do a.k.a. pay her off. So we paid her 550 pesos (about $50) and she let us go. So on we went, trying to get to the right road that would take us to Acapulco. GPS told us to take an exit that was not there so we had to take a bunch of side roads to get back to where we were supposed to be. While taking these roads another cop pulls us over for not having a front license plate. Luckily he was nice and let us go since we were American but told us to get one or we'd just keep getting stopped (which has happened 2 more times since). So on we went, found the right road and started again. Then we had to pull over on the side of the freeway because Coop was about to throw up (carsick). Got him taken care of and put him in the front so it wouldn't happen again. Not too long after that we were stopped in traffic for 20 minutes because a semi had run off the road. We thought we'd be stopped there for hours but it wasn't too long and we were on our way again. When we were about 1 hour away from Acapulco we came to the main highway which turned out to be closed for some reason so we were redirected through the city (about an hour's more worth of traffic) to the other highway that would get us there. This one was just a two lane road that weaved through the mountains and little towns. As we started driving this tiny highway we came to a dead stop. After waiting in our car for half hour we decide to get out (all the kids included) and walk up the road to see if there was an accident. Once we got near the "accident" we started to see civilians with guns and a homemade road block. This was no accident! That's when I started to get really scared. We turned around immediately and as we did people started running back to their cars. I thought we were going to get shot but turns out the blockade was about to be opened leting only a few cars through so people wanted to get to their cars to get them through. We quickly got in our car and luckily got through. We had been waiting at that blockade for an hour. Not 20 minutes after that we were stopped in traffic again. Another blockade. This time we were closer to it and could see all the men with guns. They kept walking by and pointing to our car. We were the only gringos there. We anxiously waited for 2 hours, not daring to get out of the car. (My mom and I had to go potty so bad at this point that Caleb went and asked some local villagers to use their "bathroom". They were very kind and let us. The kids followed us around and told Caleb he talked like a robot :-) Back to the nightmare, they finally opened the blockade and we got through only to be stopped yet again at another blockade 20 minutes later (note that it wasn't just us getting stopped, there were hundreds of cars in line). At this point we were in a "bigger" town and Caleb asked at the gas station what was going on. Turns out that the town's themselves were forming their own militias to try and stop the drug trafficking. They were stopping all traffic for periods of time thinking that would help. After hearing that, we felt immensely better knowing that those with guns were "the good guys". We were stopped 2 more times each for around half hour. When we finally got past the last toll booth before Acapulco we had only 5 pesos left and it was 10:30pm. We made it to our hotel in Acapulco by 11. We had been in the car for 14 hours. It was the worst, scariest, most stressful day of my life!! I was worried for the safety of my kids, my parents, my self, Caleb and that was all intensified by the fact that we had no idea what was going on. Luckily I had packed way too much food and water, thinking we would use it on the way back as well so at least that wasn't a concern. And the boys just played ipads and watched movies so they were good. Our main focus was keeping Claire entertained and occupied since she's not interested in movies yet. That was a job!

Let me end this story with the fact that our hotel was awesome, cheap and right on the beach. We had a fantabulous time once we were there, so much so that we even talked about going again (by air) even after our horrific ordeal. We stayed till 1 on Saturday and drove back to Mexico City. All roads were open, no traffic and we got back to our home in 4.5 hours. To end on a good note, here are some fun pictures of us having a marvelous time on the beach in Acapulco.