How We Drove From Mexico to Honduras Without a Passport

This post is part of the ongoing Sunday Travel Selection series. Every Sunday, a new travel story is featured. This month’s theme is Breaking the Law. This week, Rachel Denning is our selected contributor.

It had been 8 months since the fateful 2nd honeymoon we’d taken to Playa del Carmen, when I had the experience that would forever alter the course of our life.

Sitting in the chapel of a local congregation, fully immersed in the language and culture, and knew, just knew, that my family needed to have this experience.

I was pregnant with our fourth at the time, the other three were home in Utah at their cousins for the week.

We’d discussed it before- living abroad, exposing our children to new ideas and cultures, and immersing them in the Spanish language that my husband had already provided a base for by speaking since birth.

I had imagined it would happen…sometime…someday down the road.

But now I knew NOW was the time.

So when we returned from our trip, we started plans and moved full speed ahead.

We researched, investigated, analyzed and strategized – living costs, plane tickets, transportation.

I gave birth to baby number four, then one by one, we sold nearly every possession -homes, furniture, clothing and all that ‘stuff’.

Now we wait. Staying at my mother-in-laws, our 8 passenger SUV loaded to the hilt, we lack one last thing.

We’d expedited passports for my husband, our baby daughter and myself.

The other three applications are drowning in a sea of paperwork due to the influx of requests as a result of a change in the law requiring passports for all travel, even to Mexico and Canada.

My husband calls the passport office again to check on the status.

“They’ll be there on Monday.”

It is Wednesday.

Antsy to begin our big adventure, we can’t wait any longer. Goodbye’s to friends and family have already been said, more than once.

So loading up in our big SUV, we head out for Arizona with plans to have the passports overnighted once they arrive.

After three days of swimming under the Tucson sun, there was still no sign of the elusive travel documents.

Keen to continue, we decide to go south of the border, since it is still possible to enter Mexico with only a birth certificate.

Four wonderful weeks we spend along the Pacific coast, in the sand and the sun- San Carlos, Mazatlan, San Blas, Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco, Puerto Escondido.

Finally we’ve reached the last major city before the Guatemalan border.

We still get the same line from the passport office – “They’ll be there on Monday.”

We’ve heard that before.

Now what do we do?

Well…It wouldn’t hurt to try crossing the border. The worst that could happen is they would say no, right?

Determined to do just that, we set off the early the next morning.

Somehow through all the chaos and confusion as we proceed from building to building and file a mountain of paperwork, we make it across.

This unexpected success gives us the bravado to try again as we reach the Guatemala/Honduras border.

Crossing in a small town near the ruins of Copan, it is almost too easy.

One little shack with a small road block, the guard glances our way and waves us through.

Our braggadocio really bolstered now, we moved quickly through Honduras, eager to see if we can make it to Nicaragua, then Costa Rica before the passports arrive.

Day three in Honduras we find ourselves at the Nicaraguan border. I wait patiently in the car with the four kids while hubby ‘does the rounds’.

Waiting…and waiting…and waiting some more. There must be something wrong. This is taking way too long.

At length when hubby returns to the car, he informs me of the fiasco our situation has created in the immigration building.

“What?? How dare you try to come to our country without a passport!!! How did you get here??? We can’t let you through to Nicaragua!! We can’t send you back to Honduras!! You don’t have passports!!”

Uh oh. What are they going to do with us?

Frightened, no downright petrified, I do what any mother hen would do. I sit on my nest of chicks.

Eight long and grueling hours I make my kids wait in that car while daddy goes back and forth and back and forth between Honduras immigration, Nicaraguan immigration, with nobody knowing what in the world to do with these crazy gringos.

Of course there’s no phone, no ATM, no connection to the outside world. We can’t call the U.S. Embassy, they can’t call the ‘supervisor’ to get permission to let us go…somewhere.

So we sit…and sit…and sit, in what feels like one of the longest days of my life.

Finally realizing that we can’t spend the night at the border, they bestow permission upon us to return to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, to visit the U.S. Embassy.

Still feeling dismayed, not knowing how it will all work out, I spend a fretful night feeling all alone and scared, cut off from family and friends, and all that is familiar.

We make it to Tegucigalpa Friday evening after the embassy has closed. Spending the weekend in a hotel with an ‘ocean view’ room, as they call it (meaning it looked out over a dirty river that ran through the metropolis,) the kids swim and enjoy the continental breakfasts.

Monday morning my husband arrives bright and early at the Embassy, and attempts to explain our unusual predicament.

The woman is very helpful, and arranges for our passports to be sent to the Embassy office. My husband discovers that she is from Utah and belongs to the same church we do!

Inviting us over for dinner, we make fast friends with her and her husband, and another family as well.

Waiting for our passports, we spend time with our new amigos playing volleyball and swimming at the Ambassadors residence.

Three days later our passports arrive, and we’re on our way again. Woah! How did they do that?

It was a crazy experience, frightening, illegal, fraught with uncertainty. But it gave me a new outlook on ‘impossible’, ‘fear’ and the ‘unknown.’

I discovered that what I believe to be impossible or frightening, is often more in my head than an actual reality.

And the elusive ‘unknown’ of what might happen is oftentimes worse that what actually occurs.

About the author:

Rachel Denning photographs and writes about her travels around the world with her husband and five children. They are currently taking an overland trip from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Follow their adventures at www.DiscoverShareInspire.com