Spitball Army

(photo: spitballarmy.com)

I’ll give you one guess why we stopped here and, no, it wasn’t for the ice cubes (aka “turista”).  We heard that Clark Gable was hanging out at a liquor store in Baja, so we went to see for ourselves.  No, really, that’s me.

It used to be the easiest thing to hop in the car, drive 40 or 45 miles to the U.S.-Mexican border, zip past Tijuana, and arrive at the Rosarita-area beaches for an afternoon of beer and lobsters and more beer.  And maybe tequila.  Each visitor was allowed to bring one bottle of Mexican-bought booze home across the border, and we would predictably grab a few bottles of Kahlua and Cuervo.  This picture was from a trek in the mid-’80s, I think.

I don’t really want to romanticize the memory of those trips, though, as fun as they always were.  The living conditions of most people that we could see on the road from Tijuana were dirty; the poverty then was at least as bad as I imagine it is now.  Is it as easy as it used to be to cross the border at San Diego, then just come on back?  My guess is that 9/11 put a stop to that.