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We got our first impression of Sonora, Mexico's second largest state by area, when we dashed through a small part of it at the beginning of May, 2003. At that point we weren't interested in exploring but in getting across the border into the USA; our goal was , DouglasArizona and beyond. That morning we had driven 100 miles from Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico, at first across long stretches of the Chihuahua desert before climbing rapidly into the Sierra Madre Occidental. When we got to the top, or really to a large, deep cut for the highway that avoids reaching the top of the watershed, we looked out onto Sonora and the Sonoran desert. Before us we could see most of our remaining route: flat country, punctuated by mountains. We would spend another hour driving 50 miles on Mexican Highway 2, paralleling the US border. For that hour we would look at the mountains to our right, 5-10 miles to the north, and wonder if they were in Mexico or the USA.

The end of that day's Mexican drive was the border city of Agua Prieta. When we arrived it was Demonstration Hour. The labor unions were out in force, parading through the streets, with banners proclaiming the dignity of labor and that it wasn't paid enough. Most of the unions seemed to represent workers in the government sector, which is a large part of the Mexican economy. The city is one of Sonora's larger ones, but probably has less than 50,000 people. Besides being a bit dingier and grungier than a comparable American city, and despite having its signs in Spanish, it was immediately a familiar place: it is laid out on a grid, has many of the same cars we would see in the USA, and even many of the same shops.

At Agua Prieta - Douglas the Mexican-American border is not defined by a geographical feature, such as a river or mountain ridge, but by a theoretical construct, a latitude. For some 150 miles the border runs along lattitude 31 degrees, 20 seconds north. (For those who care, this is almost the same lattitude as that of Waco, Texas; a bit south of Savannah, Georgia and Marrakech, Morroco; and the same as Shanghai, China.) Right in the middle of this 150-mile long line are Agua Prieta and Dougleas and right in the middle of , themdividing them north-south is an east-west street, with Douglas, Arizona on the north side and Agua Prieta on the south side.

We didn't know this or almost any of the above facts before we arrived. We had a simple map of Mexico that showed Highway 10 and then Hwy 2 would take us from Nuevo Casas Grandes to Agua Prieta, which appeared to be a convenient place to cross the border. When we came into town we simply pointed ourselves north, discovered the labor demonstrations, stopped to watch them for ten minutes, drove around them as best we could, and when we tumbled onto a sign for the border crossing, followed it.

In a few minutes we found ourselves among three lanes of cars that inched forward on the street that makes up the border; we didn't comprehend until later why it had a fence down its middle as we didn't realize how close to the USA we were. After half an hour we had inched forward 500 yards and suddenly had to make a sharp right turn. There we suddenly had to choose which of five or six lines to be in; we did and were in a line with 10 cars ahead of us waiting for US customs and immigration inspection. Without percieving it, as we had made the sharp turn we had entered into the USA. When we got to the inspection we were quickly passed through. But before proceeding onwards we asked the American official where Mexican customs was. He said that of course it was in Mexico, in fact, "right over there" pointing to the spot where cars enter Mexico from the USA. The border was defined by a simple row of raised metal bumps in the middle of the asphalt.

We needed Mexican customs because we needed a receipt to show that we had re-exported our car. If we didn't, eventually a large, large bill would show up on our Visa card for Mexican import duties that had been suspended as long as our temporary import permit was valid. We now knew that we had missed the office and must return. Although dejected because going over there would mean we would again have to get into the long line we had just passed through, we made a u-turn and in under 30 seconds were back in Mexico and parked at their customs. There we found a fellow who didn't speak English, or more probably didn't want to speak English, and explained in our limited Spanish what we wanted. He brusquely went through the motions, cancelled our import, and gave us a receipt. The happy ending is that from there we found a short cut back to the line, cut in at almost the front, and in another five minutes had gone through USA customs a second time.