Lauren and I decided that if we were in Tijuana, we should party like it. So around 11pm, we reluctantly dragged ourselves out of our hotel and went out in search of a beer. We had barely exited when a guy from a bar across the street started calling out to us. When we didn’t respond, he ran up to us, telling us him name was Alex and explaining that they were having 2 for 1 beers. We told him we had to run an errand (to put up a blog) and we’d come back later.

When we came up the stairs and were seated with much ado on the balcony, right in view of passers by, we had to really argue with Alex to get out of him exactly how much the 2 for 1 cost.

“Seven dollars,” he responded.

“What?!?” Lauren exclaimed.

Yes, this guy thought we’d go for the deal of ‘buy 1 beer for $7 and get one for free!’ Lauren and I could not believe it. Lauren started arguing with him, finally getting him down to $4, but that was still too expensive for us so we left.

Down the street, another guy from a bar stopped us, offering us the same deals. We argued and argued. They offered 10 beers for $10, which was more our price, but a little out of our drinking range. Lauren managed to get them all the way down to 4 beers for $4, a deal that the manager had to approve.

We were led upstairs to a mostly empty bar and they sat us right at the railing overlooking the street. We realized that we got our deal because they were so desperate to get people in – and they wanted people outside to think the bar was fuller than it was. We didn’t care. We just wanted to have our two beers and go home.

Before our beers had even arrived, a guy came around with a bottle of tequila and started blowing a loud whistle. He practically forced Lauren’s head back, pouring the tequila into her mouth. We both thought this was funny and took photos. I went next.

After we had done our “shots,” the guy told Lauren that the shots were $7 each, for a total of $14. We laughed. It was a ridiculous price and there was no way we were paying. Lauren told him that we had been told outside that we got a free shot (they had said this with other deals but I doubted it was supposed to come with this deal). I’m not sure if he was used to having people refuse to pay or if Lauren’s face was just so clearly peeved and un-budging, but he quickly backed down, asking for only a tip. We tipped him $2 and avoided him for the rest of the night.

We amused ourselves watching some of the worst dancers ever taking center stage. Lauren kept insisting that they had to be paid dancers. Soon, though, our amusement turned to horror.

Behind Lauren, a commotion had started. I quickly figured out that a really (really) drunk girl had thrown up. Oddly, a barman cleaned up the mess but didn’t kick her and her two friends out. The girl was so drunk that she couldn’t keep her head up. She started passing out and falling out of her chair. Her friend would just grab her by her ponytail and pull her back up. Soon, she’d start falling the other way. But her friends didn’t care. They didn’t want their night to be over.

Two guys took an interest to them and one started giving them advice.

“You need to get her to the border right now,” he told them.

Lauren and I looked at each other. The last thing we’d want to do is have to deal with Homeland Security while we were completely wasted. The girls’ friends had no intention of taking her across the border, though, but not for fear of being arrested on the other side for public drunkenness – they weren’t ready to stop partying.

As we were staring at this train wreck, another rolled in.

A very pregnant woman (at least 8-months) came barreling over, definitely drunk and maybe on drugs. She sat down at the table behind me and started ordering. We were briefly impressed when the waiter starting pointing to her stomach – we were guessing that he was refusing to serve her since she was pregnant. But a few minutes later, she was double-fisting pina coladas.

We had enough and left. As we left the bar, taxi drivers bombarded us asking us if we wanted to go to the border. We were shocked that it was apparently common practice to come down to TJ, get trashed, and head back home over the border.

The next morning, we checked into a different hotel. It wasn’t that our hotel was the biggest dump we’d ever seen (although the mattresses could be over 50 years old), but we found a splurge down the street – the Hotel Caesar. We had reserved a Master Suite room – for $70, it included two rooms, two queen size beds, two TVs, a sofa and an enormous bathroom. It was our last night on the trip and we wanted to go out in style.

Unfortunately, when we got there, we were told that despite our reservation, they had given the room to someone else – and they weren’t leaving.

So we ended up in a $55 room – not as obnoxiously grand, but definitely clean, with a glass-walled shower — and with mattresses that were not older than me.

We were waiting for Katie to come meet us that morning, so Lauren and I hung around working on our to do lists and fantasizing about crossing the border. We were expecting Katie around noon, but as the hours started to tick by… 12pm, 1pm, 2pm… there was no sign of Katie.

Trying not to let our imagination wander and fear that our trip would end with a tragedy, we decided to leave a note for Katie and go out to do errands. As soon as we got down the hotel stairs, though, there she was – our chauffeur home!

After catching up in our lush pad for an hour or two, we did some last minute gift shopping, finding some fabric for Lauren’s quilt. This really nice vendor actually cut a piece off of a larger blanket for her to use – his wife would make a pancho out of the leftover fabric. He also held the camera for our video project (details to be released at a later date) and loaned us some sombreros for the shoot.

It was Katie’s first trip to Mexico, so we couldn’t leave Tijuana without having some margaritas. The day before, on our walk to the border, a guy named Pablo told us he’d get us good specials and guaranteed that all the drinks were made with purified water and ice, so we decided to head there.

The drink specials were a little screwy, forcing us to either pay a lot for one margarita or get two margaritas plus a shot for less money (no sharing!), so we ended up with six margaritas and three shots for the table. We piled two orders of nachos and some queso fundito on top of it, just to ensure we were all a little slow moving the next morning.

As we got ready to leave, our waiter starting talking to us about his life in the U.S. His mother had moved him there when he was 1 year old, and he never got full citizenship. But he was working in plastics for a long time, doing engineering-type stuff (I think) before getting involved in drug dealing in order to pay child support on the many offspring he had spawned. In the end, he got caught and went to jail, refused to rat on anyone and ended up in a Mexican vs. Mexican-American gang fight (he was on the Mexican-American side). When he got released, the authorities labeled him a “terrorist” because of his gang affiliation and deported him. The whole story was insane, and at points you couldn’t help but feel sympathy – and at other times, complete horror.

We tipped him well and went home, avoiding the 2-for-1 touts along the main strip. We stayed up late talking about our trip and Katie’s year before finally turning in.

“It feels like Christmas eve!” Lauren whispered to me, too excited to sleep.

The next morning we ran a few quick last minute errands before strapping on our bags. They were filled with multiple bottles of tequila now, so they probably weighed over 40 lbs. We caught a taxi to the border and walked across the bridge.

But what had been a no-wait line Thursday afternoon was now thousands and thousands of people long. A guy told us that it was an hour and a half or two hour wait, but Lauren and I could not believe it. We sent Katie to go see if there was an express lane for U.S. citizens (like we had seen for citizens at the dozens of countries whose borders we had crossed in the last 11 months), and we went in search of the end of the line.

Between where we were standing and the end of the line was at least another thousand people. The line wrapped up a street, turned around, came all the way back down the street, turned again and started heading down the side of a major highway. Lauren and I got in line and were saddened to see Katie walking back, shaking her head. We were less than a mile from home – and still two hours away.

The line was hot and sweaty. There would be spurts of movement and then long periods with us just standing in the hot sun waiting. We ended up putting on sunscreen to avoid getting burned.

Almost two hours later, we were almost to the immigration building. We wanted to get video of us walking across in from the sign that said “Welcome to the United States of America,” but when we got up there, a jerk Homeland Security guy told us we couldn’t film – that this was government property. He forced us on after yelling at Katie who held the camcorder.

When we got to the border, we were completely confused by what was going on. Tons and tons of people were crossing the border by just showing what appeared to be driver’s licenses (this does not happen in other countries) or what appeared to be a sheet of paper (!?!). The officers just waved people through, no questions asked.

We finally made it to the beginning of the line, and I gave the Homeland Security officer my passport. He started flipping through all the visas.

“How long have you been out of the country?” he asked.

“One year,” I said.

“For what?” he asked.

“Just to travel,” I responded.

“What do you do?” he continued. I was getting annoyed. What does this have to do with anything? I’m a U.S. citizen. I can enter the country.

“I’m a student,” I responded.

“What are you studying?” he asked.

“LAW,” I responded, a little more forcefully. That seemed to satisfy him and he waved me on.

Because of me, however, he was tipped off to Lauren and started asking her obnoxious questions.

“What are you planning on doing when you return?” he asked her.

‘Live off welfare!!’ Lauren later said she had considered saying. What did it matter what we were going to do? You don’t have to be employed to come home!

He finally waved us through and customs scanned our bags. We stepped out of the other side of the building and there we were, in the U.S

We tried to find a Welcome To the USA sign to take a photo in front of but there was nothing that we could see. Lauren asked to cops if there were any signs.

“No,” the cop responded. “They’re all on the other side.”

Lauren told them we tried to take a photo but Homeland Security wouldn’t let us. The cops thought that was strange, but the bottom line was we were out of luck. We looked around for several options to do our final shot of our video project and settled on using the actual immigration building for a background. It was extremely difficult to get a good shot without crowds blocking the shot, and it took several tries.

(Lauren: I was determined to get my final shot, but Beth was tired. “I’m more interested in getting home than documenting us getting home,” she said snippily after the first few tries. After a couple more tries and tense moments, we got the final shot, argued a bit on the way to the car about who needed to calm down more, and then finally looked around, apologized for our crankiness, and rejoiced that we had made it home. We were over the border.)

We traversed another mile to Katie’s rental car and celebrated that we were in a car and not a bus. I celebrated that we could stop whenever I wanted to pee, a luxury I hadn’t been afforded in the last year.

Before we even got five miles from the border, Lauren forced us to exit and go to… Taco Bell. She claimed this particular Taco Bell had the best burritos she’d ever had. I was personally sick of Mexican food, so I went to the bathroom and celebrated my own way – by flushing toilet paper, another luxury I hadn’t enjoyed for many, many months.

After some quesadillas, taco supremes, and a crunch wrap, we all piled back in the car. It was three hours to L.A., where Lauren’s mom was waiting for us and where more clean toilets, potable tap water and other delights would greet us.