That sounds like a lot more important title than it really is. My family and I went to Mexico for Spring Break last week and came back today. It takes a lot less time to get INTO Mexico than it does to get back. Everyone asked us “How long did you spend in line at the border?”
So I thought I would take a quick look.
We all loaded up in the family truckster (Navigator) and left town Wednesday (after 2 botched attempts trying to leave Scottsdale forgetting, in order, the radar detector, and then our passports [note passports aren't necessary but I didn't want to find out that changed recently]). We came home today (Easter Sunday) and had to leave Rocky Point early since we’ve heard about the wait on Sundays back to Arizona taking over 4 hours.
Here’s a quick 10 second map-based history which I ran:
Here is where we parked the car for a day and a half before venturing out to town to buy the obligatory tourista materials each year (maraca’s, mini-guitars, vanilla, tons of shrimp, and the obligatory “Cuban” cigars…).
Zooming down on where we stayed shows where I parked the car for a few minutes while checking in (beautiful property, by the way, called Las Palomas at Rocky Point, Mexico) — note that while we drove 257.5 miles up to that point on Wednesday, the last “leg” of the trip (after getting lunch) ws 103.1 miles. By the way, I would have lost my sanity on this as well as all other long trips if not for Sirius Satellite Radio and 2 DVD players for our 3 kids on the way down…
Now for the fun part, heading back to the border — unless you want to get stuck in line for 4 hours, you need to leave early in the AM. With one screenshot, I can tell the following:
* We left at 8:12 AM (first point under the March 23, 2008 folder)
* We stopped for breakfast from 8:22 until 8:35 getting some doughnuts and coffee for the drive [note the blue idle dot, yellow “off” stop, and second blue “idle” stop from 8:22 until 8:33. There was one person in front of us in line — all I can say is that things move slowly south of the border…
* We went under the posted speed limit numerically (although our units of measure were off) — all of the light green dots show “Speedy Gonzalez activity” over 67 mph. The one I clicked upon (86 MPH) was technically below the limit of 90, but that was KPH…
* Not all of our maps support non US roads (not really a problem, since we won’t actively sell to non-US customers until Q3 2008)
* We spent less than 40 minutes from the time we arrived “in line” at the border until we got past it and back on our way — the first “clumped together” point has a 9:44 timestamp on it, and the first point across the border was at 10:24.
Let’s quantify just how long it took getting INTO Mexico vs. coming back from Mexico by drawing a quick polygon geofence around the border area:
Running a quick report with a couple mouse clicks looks like this:
Yields this report, which shows us that it took 2 minutes to clear the border going INTO Mexico but 40 minutes coming back. This report only took .12 seconds to run and also shows us that we spent 3 days, 18 hours, 9 minutes between border visits:
Because we use AT&T/T-Mobile’s GPRS network, we lose contact with the vehicle once it’s over the border, and will show you how quickly we forward that data back once we regain coverage. The “vertical” lines show long “lags” between a point being recorded & it being reported via cellular transmission.
For the entire trip, the vast majority of the points are into our database and available to the end user/customer within 3-5 seconds. Predictably, where we stop network compatibility, we stop reporting in real time — however, the second we hit coverage again at the border (typically, a couple miles prior to the border) all of that data is forwarded up within seconds so no history is ever lost:
In reality, we forwarded up all of that data at exactly 9:48:29, 1/3 of one mile South of the border:
But here’s a better idea of what is going on .31 miles south of the border while waiting in line to get through — everything imaginable is being sold, none of which would fly with my homeowner’s association. My favorite was the gold painted grim reaper:
I was told it was almost free. Only 5,000 pesos. Maybe next time I’ll pick it up if I stay too long and wind up spending 4 hours in the line at the border. Today we were OK with some fresh tortillas for 2 bucks.
Rob.