Crack Dream #1: Adventures in Mexico

There we were. Mexico. We were on a tour of poppy fields. It was amazing. All kinds of different poppies. Big ones, small ones, some the size of your head! Red ones, pink ones...we drove past this field of GIANT blue poppies. They were the size of palm trees, their petals blowing softly in the wind. Wes and I got out of the car to admire some of the smaller poppies. I just gazed around at the beauty and I said to Wes, "I want to move here so I can live on a poppy farm." It was truly a spectacle.

Next thing I know we are in the back seat of a sedan driving back from a safari. It is a dirt road and it is full of puddles because of a heavy rain. Our drivers, an older couple, seem to be maneuvering through it fine though. We come to a big puddle that spans the road. It looks deep too. Then I see an elephant's head emerging from the puddle. I shriek, "Holy sh*$!", then I realize my company and say, "Pardon me, I've just never seen a real live elephant before." It was a calm elephant, but that puddle must have been really deep to contain a whole elephant. But we drove on through. It seemed harder to steer because of the water, but again, the drivers were handling it.

We were almost across the puddle when I saw another elephant ahead in the water. We tried to steer around it, but we ended up almost driving over its head. When we bumped it, the elephant bucked and sent our car rolling out of the puddle and on the side of the road.

The car had flipped a few times and was clearly not drivable. So we decided to set up camp. Apparently we had more passengers because now we were setting up camp with K, J, D, & J. We went through everything in the car and salvaged what we could to make beds and a shelter to keep us safe in the Mexican outback.

After staying there for a few days, I realized that we had camped right outside of a resort. So Wes and I decided to go in to try to get some help. We were kind of dirty and clearly the people in the resort thought less of us. They looked at us very funny. After finding no use in the hotel prospect we decided to go back to our camp. In the time that we had been gone, our small camp had grown into a refugee camp. Makeshift tents everywhere. Then we realized why we had been treated weird. We were being discriminated against because we were refugees! It was an awkward feeling, but we just decided to go back and live among the people who were outcasts. It felt much more like home.