Continuing on into the interior of Mexico my family and the Grimes family took our travel trailers and moved further into Mexico though we only traveled in the daylight hours. Our cars were not happy with the gasoline that we gave them as all cars used leaded gas at the time and ethanol was NOT part of the gasoline product in the United States, however, in Mexico ethanol was used instead of gasoline in Mexico at the time and our cars spitted and sputtered. Our fears were that we would be stalled somewhere along the roads at night and the "banditos" would come along and we would be in trouble. It seems that the warnings that the border guards gave us were not unwarranted. We stopped in as many cities as we could to visit shopping areas and historical sites. We stopped in areas that were not visited much by "gringos" as they called us so English was not often found in the areas we visited but we enjoyed our sight seeing none the less, we had a wonderful trip.
In our driving we would see the most beautiful Missions. They were AMAZING buildings. They would be sitting quietly in the middle of nowhere with nothing around them but desert and cacti. After seeing a number of them we decided that we would drive up to one and see if we could persuade the monks or priests or sisters or whomever was in charge to let us have a tour of the Mission. We drove into the yard of on of the missions and didn't even get out of the car, heck dad didn't even get the car engine turned off and from out of nowhere hundreds, literally HUNDREDS of children came out of the building and surrounded the car speaking Spanish pressing up against the vehicle. They were pressing the Grimes' car just as hard. This we knew because we had walkie taklies and were communicating and Uncle Bobby was panicking just as we were. Not speaking Spanish no one could figure out what was happening and no adult seemed to come out to explain or to shoo the children away. Since children were not moving away from the cars and they were pressing in so hard it would have been dangerous for my father to have made any effort to move the car in any direction. Both fathers finally came up with the idea of using the change our mothers had put into bags for the laundry mat. They came up with the idea that we would partially roll down the windows and throw money out the windows as far away from the car as we could so our dads could drive away as quickly as possible. That's what we all did in both cars and believe it or not it worked.
We thought the whole experience was a was a fluke but low and behold we were crazy enough to stop at one more Mission to try to get a tour, they are just such beautiful buildings. The same thing happened. We used the same technique with the same success and decided that we would have to admire them from a decidedly long distance.
Carrying huge (hidden) amounts of change in the "off the beaten pathways" in the late 1960's early 1970's was a wise choice in Mexico. It got us out of many a problem, many, many, many times. For real.
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