Dental disaster and Mexico border blunders: One RVer’s now-hilariously unlucky day!

Letter to the Editor: By Fred Burns
Everyone has their good and bad days throughout life. I consider myself fortunate as I think I’ve had more “good luck” than most over the years. I always attribute this to my Irish luck, since I’m 100% Irish. But my luck ran out on Saturday, March 21, 2015. The number of negative things that happened to me that day defy reason. I’m not talking about life-altering events, just an unbelievable number of minor incidents. Here is my day from hell.

We are currently working as oilfield gate guards out of our RV in a remote area of South Texas. I developed a problem with one of my teeth a few weeks ago and went to a dentist in a nearby town. He couldn’t find which tooth was the problem so he put me on penicillin, thinking it was a sinus problem. This didn’t help so I then traveled 100 miles to San Antonio for a consultation with a root canal specialist. They couldn’t be sure which tooth it was either. So I had now spent $300 out of pocket with no result. Over the next few weeks, I narrowed it down on my own to one of two teeth side by side, both of which had previous root canals and crowns. I then scheduled an appointment with a Mexican dentist to open up and clean out the problem root canal. The closest Mexican dentist available was a 250-mile trip to cross the border at McAllen, Texas.

My day in hell started with my appointment day. I had to leave the RV at 4 a.m. to reach my appointment at 9 a.m. This area of South Texas has few good roads due to the heavy traffic of oilfield tankers and drilling equipment. The night I was to leave it started raining heavily and continued throughout the next day. The drive was very stressful on bad roads complicated by constant heavy rain, flooding, and large puddles everywhere with no lighting anywhere on the roads in this area.

I set my GPS for the Progreso bridge that crosses from McAllen to Nuevo, where my appointment was in the first building across the bridge into Nuevo Progreso, Mexico. About halfway there I suddenly realized I had forgotten my passport, but, being the positive person I am, I figured it would be okay and I would get across and back with my driver’s license.

After a very stressful 250 miles in the rain and dark, I approached the border and saw the signs indicating the border crossing. As I approached the check station lanes, I looked for the parking lot I saw on Google Earth that I would park in. At this point, I turned off the GPS so I wouldn’t be confused as I was looking for the lot entrance. I pulled in, paid the parking fee, stuffed my cell phone, Kindle, dental night guard, appointment paperwork, and a water bottle in my backpack and walked across the bridge. You’re not even stopped when walking into Mexico, but I first checked with the U.S. border patrol office to see if I could get back in without a passport. They said no problem.

After crossing the border 45 minutes early for my appointment, I looked around and saw nothing that looked like the scene I saw on Google Earth Street View and couldn’t find the building I needed. I finally found a woman who spoke a few halting words of English and showed her my printed page of the map of the building on the street where the dentist was. She brought up Google Maps on her cell phone and couldn’t make any sense of the street name on my map. Finally, she Googled my dentist’s name and said, “Ahhhh, you crossed over the Hidalgo bridge and you need to cross the Progreso bridge.”

It took a few attempts on her part before I understood what she was trying to tell me. I was flabbergasted. How could my GPS have brought me to the wrong bridge 20 miles from where I needed to be? I thanked her and rushed back to the border crossing only to see a line of over 400 Mexicans waiting in a long line to go through immigration to enter the U.S.

It would probably take four hours to cross back over, which would cancel my appointment and ruin my day’s 500-mile round trip. So I made a bold decision and stepped into the roadway near the crossing and approached a motorist in a red truck waiting in line. He rolled down his window and I explained my situation to him and asked if I could ride across the border with him. He seemed hesitant at first but then said, “Okay.” I got in and put my backpack on the floor beside my leg. I had my umbrella in my hand. It took us another 20 minutes to queue up at the U.S. checkpoint and we chatted about many things, including my predicament. Fortunately, the officer who approached the vehicle had seen and heard me asking about getting back across the border without a passport earlier and we were passed through with no problem.

The driver went only about 100 feet and then let me out to get my truck in the parking lot. As I approached my truck I suddenly panicked as I realized I had left my backpack in the good Samaritan’s truck and had never gotten any personal information on him. I had gotten out of the truck with my umbrella in my hand so in my mind I “felt” like I had everything. When I had put the bag down next to my legs I had a fleeting thought, “Should I be setting this down?” Now I had no phone to call the dentist nor their phone number. Also, I had lost my Kindle and mouthguard.

I reset my GPS and as I started to follow the directions, I realized the mistake I had made. I had assumed the GPS was taking me through McAllen and straight south over the Progreso bridge at the south end of McAllen just as it had done the day before when I looked up the route in the GPS. But for some reason, it took me a different way this morning. It decided to take me to Hidalgo, Texas, and then, just a hundred feet before that border crossing, it directed me to turn left on 281 Spur and travel right along the border 20 miles to the Progreso bridge crossing. Since I had turned the GPS off as I approached the bridge I didn’t hear the turn direction and I assumed I was at the Progreso bridge. I also didn’t notice the little mileage number in the upper right corner of the GPS that would have told me I still had 20 miles to go to my destination.

So now I’m speeding down 281 Spur to try to salvage my appointment and pissed off about leaving the backpack in the Samaritan’s truck when I pass a state trooper going the other way on the 2-lane road. I look in my rearview mirror and see him turning around. I stay positive and think, “Not me!!” As he got close, I politely pulled over expecting him to fly by with lights flashing. He didn’t pass by, but pulled in behind me. He told me I was speeding, but when I explained my bad day so far, he decided to give me just a warning.

I finally made it to the correct border crossing and hurried across. Because there are a couple of dozen dentists in the first block after the border crossing in most of the Mexican border towns, they aren’t usually real busy and my 45-minute late arrival was not a problem. They had called our main cell number, which my wife had with her, when I didn’t show up, so now my wife was worried and wondering what had happened to me. I called her to explain.

Then the root canal specialist examined me and looked at the x-rays I had forwarded and thought it could be either of the two teeth I had suspected. It was a crapshoot which one it was, so I decided to spend the money and have him clean out both canals, but he’d only have to replace one crown since he could drill through one of them and save it. In between the root canal work and the crown replacement, I had a 3-hour wait for the crown to be made, so I called my wife again, only to find out the oil company was closing the gate we guarded so we would be out of work two days later.

So, at this point, I had lost about $400 of my belongings and the dental visit is going to cost me almost twice what I had expected (no insurance) and we were out of a job. When I finished with my appointment at 4 p.m., I called my wife and started the 4-hour trip back to the RV. It was still raining hard and as I was cruising along a group of turkey buzzards on the side of the road flew up and one of them decided to play chicken with me. I missed him by just a couple of feet. Then a few miles farther down the road an oncoming truck kicked up a stone that hit the windshield. It didn’t sound very loud and I couldn’t see any damage, but it was dark and still raining. The next morning I discovered a 12” crack in the windshield.

I finally made it back by 8:15 p.m., a 16-hour, 500-mile day. Since I worked the gate days and my wife at night, she had been up for 32 hours. But since she had managed to take several one-hour naps during that time, she worked Saturday night also and went 48 hours without a normal night’s sleep. There wasn’t much else that could have gone wrong that day.

Very surprisingly, many of Saturday’s negatives were reversed on Sunday. I got a call from our contractor and he had a new gate for us starting Wednesday, which was very unexpected since many of the oil wells in Texas are shutting down due to the collapse of oil prices in the last 9 months. Shortly after that, I got a call from the guy whose truck I left my bag in. I didn’t have my name on anything in the bag but he called the last number on the phone which was our main phone. We arranged to have the stuff shipped to me. By Saturday night I felt I had lost all of my “Irish luck,” but by Sunday afternoon I got it back. Now that I’ve recovered, I hope to never have another day like this again.

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