Mexican Vacation

We did a family vacation to Mazatlan last week, which included my French in-laws (mother, father and sister). Overall, it was pretty good.

I was expecting slightly better prices and deals, considering Mexico is still somewhat recovering from last year's swine flu and this years crime reports, but prices weren't too bad. No great deals on food, unless one went for the small taco stands and un-air-conditioned restaurants. Merchandise also wasn't a significant savings, even with bargaining (and some places were clearly not interested in doing that, or at least with 'tourists'), but didn't get ripped off at least.

Mazatlan is apparently quite ripe for developers, or at least trying to be. They were doing a lot of hard sells for these new Private Residence Clubs. A bit similar to the time share bit, except that they want to "lease" you the space, with the hope that you'll eventually want to buy a whole vacation home. The biggest problem we had (besides the large upfront payment) was being tied to just a few areas (the one we went to was offered in about 5-6 places in Mexico, but nowhere else). We like to travel and see new and different things. We're not interested in buying a vacation home in one place.

Weather was good, flight decent enough (Continental was ok, free food that was good, free checked bag back to the US). It was more humid than I expected, we definitely needed to do laundry during the trip. I was also a bit annoyed at the seat assignments, it was a real effort to try and get seats together 2 at a time, so each parent could sit with a child.

My main surprise was the price of sun lotion. $15 a bottle. If I had known that, I would have checked a bag full of it. I didn't bring any because I thought I could buy it for a comparative price and didn't want to pay $25 for a checked bag. I thought I would have had to pay the bag fee for the Philly to Houston flight, but since we went onto Mexico, I may not have anyway (since I didn't get charged to check a bag coming back). But it still would have saved money to pay $25 to check a bag with the 4 bottles of sun lotion we went through at $15 a piece.

We had checked one bag in Mexico all the way to Philly (everyone else had carry-ons). The one bag was selected to carry all the liquids we were taking home (a bottle of tequila, two bottles of vanilla, suntan lotion, after-sun lotion, etc.). My father in law then bought some duty free Tequila at the Mexico Airport, which he carried on the plane.

After going through immigration in Houston (which had its own issues), we had to collect the "checked bag" from baggage claim, take everything through the final customs check, then "recheck" the "checked bag". At that time, we were told that we had to place the duty free tequila bottle in the "checked bag" or we couldn't take it through the security screening we had to go through again to our connecting flight. Fortunately we had room to do that, although I was somewhat concerned with protection for the bottle, especially since we were a bit rushed because immigration took forever.

My question is what could we do if we hadn't previously "checked" a bag so that we had one available to place the duty free bottle inside? There were no areas set up to do a formal "checking" process for a bag after immigration/customs, you had one area to give the already "checked" bag, then you had to go through security.

I'm told we would have just had to throw away the duty free bottle. That makes no sense. Isn't the point of duty free with it being in a special sealed bag supposed to serve the security purpose? I'm glad we had room for the bottle, but what if we had bought more or didn't have an already "checked bag"? I'm told that this is the wonderful TSA v. Duty Free issue and TSA wins. So be warned. If you are flying internationally, make sure you check a bag if you intend to buy duty free liquids and go through customs in a different city than your final destination.

We had another wonderful issue, this time with immigration. I'm just so fed up with the obvious lack of training and/or poor training provided to employees. No one ever seems to know the rules or the correct way to apply them.

My french sister in law has a B2 visa she got a few years ago when she lived with us for five months while providing some child care. The B2 visa is valid for 10 years. Even when she's just visiting a few weeks, now every time she comes to the US, she had to fill out a special form that allows her to remain in the US for 6 months, even though she doesn't stay that long now.

She filled out this form when she entered the US a few days before our Mexico vacation, and kept part of it in her passport as required. When we went to Mexico, no one removed it from her passport, although apparently someone was supposed to do so. When we came back to the US, she had to fill out the form again, even though she still had the part of the form from the prior week. The immigration officer practically accused her fraud and worse because she still had the part form from the prior week because someone else didn't do their job and remove it from her passport. She didn't know that was required, she didn't remember what occurred the last time she visited.

So when she returns to France, she has to be sure someone takes both of these forms back out of her passport. Otherwise, she could be barred from visiting again. I just love our wonderful Homeland Security's failures at training.

We're constantly learning new rules in air flight. I guess I'm becoming an expert on this.