I don’t have any great stories from Europe. Nothing unusual happened to us. It was just fun all the time.

When I came back my boyfriend and I got engaged. I worked for a few months and we get married and moved to Toronto. He was from a suburb of Toronto and we moved there. That’s where I got my first real job in an emergency room.

The boyfriend was named John, and he was a stockbroker working downtown for Merrill Lynch. He got on the train in the morning and commuted downtown where I just walked two blocks to the hospital. I ended up working with two girls with whom I had graduated so that was nice. Instant community.

I worked in Toronto for quite awhile, for me. Two or three years. I got married when I was 22 and got divorced just before I was 25.

I started traveling. In fact during this time was the first trip I made to Mexico. I took a couple of months off to travel down here. I had separated from John, and that was a good excuse to go out and travel.

It was either late 1972 or the spring of 73. I was working in the emergency room and we had a nice, vibrant group of young people. We had the same tastes; we used to socialize together. The doctors were young and fun and smart and a very good at what they did. It was a pretty nice group.

This hospital was about twenty minutes from downtown and in an affluent suburb of Toronto. It was the closest hospital to the Airport. We had two major highways on either side of us that were about eight blocks away from the hospital, and there were lots of small industries around us.

So being an emergency room nurse we got the best car accidents and the best industrial accidents. Airport crashes. We had excellent trauma services. If you wanted to be in an emergency room this was the place to be. I enjoyed it. I was good at it.

I worked with a woman by the name of Evelyn. We met in the emergency room and became friends. Both she and I got fed up with work at the same time.

We had this humongous car crash early in the fall when roads were slippery and icy. There were about 30 farm workers standing up and the back of the truck. They weren’t wearing any headgear. The truck rolled over several times. I was the closest want to the hospital and the nurses on night shift called me and said: “you better get over here! We’ve had a bad accident!”

I was just waking up and all this pandemonium, blood, and gore was thrown at me. I think 90% of the people we treated that they died. That’s a bad day in the ER, a very bad day.

So that’s the day I decided that after the divorce drama that I would take some time off. Had coffee break I said to my friend Evelyn: “you know, I think I need to take some time off.”

She said: “yeah, we’re all just bombed about this. I think we need to take the weekend off.”

I said: “no, I’m thinking like a trip to Panama!”

She said: “like the Panama canal Panama?”

I said: “yeah, that one. I’ve always wanted to see Central America. I think I’ll go out and see how much a Volkswagen camper would cost.”

She said: “are you kidding?”

I said: “I’m not kidding. I’ve done this before.”

She said: “hey, I’m in! If you’re going, I’m going to!”

So I went out at lunchtime and bought a Volkswagen camper. I told Evelyn: “okay now we’ve done it, and we have to go see the director of nursing in getting leave of absence.”

She said: “how long do you think?”

I said: “about a year.”

She was shaking and blue because she hadn’t saved quite as much as I had. But I think we got about ten months off that time. I worked double shifts right up until the last minute before we were supposed to leave. It was a snowy December day.

Evelyn and pulled up in my house and I was in the closet pulling close off of hangers and throwing them into a bag. I wasn’t ready; I had worked up until ten minutes before that time. Off we went!

We hopped in the car, turn south, and had no plan of how we were gonna get their Orwick highway we would take. All we knew was we had to go to Detroit to get across the border and we thought that we would figure out the highways from there. We thought: “it can’t be that hard, can it?”

Two girls and a Volkswagen van traveling across America, away from the snow. We camped a lot; it was fun.

I got to Todos Santos on our first trip. I had stopped in a State park in Oceanside, California. There was a bar across the street and we thought we’d go over there and have a couple of drinks. They had a pool table, and both Evelyn and I were pretty good. We liked playing pool.

There was a man there who started talking to us and asked us what we’re doing. We told him we were going to Mexico.

He told us: “that’s funny. I have a little place down in a tiny town there and I am leaving tomorrow!”

He asked us if we spoke Spanish and we told him no. He asked us if we knew anything about Mexico and we told him no. So he said if we wanted to trail along with him we were welcome to do so. He said he could introduce us to some people in Todos Santos.

So that’s how I got here; by going to play some billiards.

This fellow’s parents lived in that area so he went home and we met on the highway the next morning.
His parents later moved down here and I became the best friends with his mother until she passed away. His name was Tom Rutherford, and he was the first gringo to come to total scientists. He was it!

We came down in either the fall of 1972 or the spring of 1973. That was the first year they opened the brand-new paved highway. It wasn’t done all the way; you would come to stretches, especially in southern Baja where the road was still dirt.

On the way down we got two EL Rosario and president Echeverria was there opening the highway. He was cutting the ribbon on the transpeninsular highway. We got to shake his hand!

There weren’t many people there. Today, EL Rosario is just a clearing in the road. Back then there were about five houses. We were the only gringos at the ceremony.

Tom Rutherford had been in the merchant marine. He traveled for half a year and had the other half off. He spent his time between Oceanside, California, and Todos Santos, Mexico. He described Todos Santos as just the perfect place: a teeny, tiny crossroads pound with lots of water. It just sounded perfect. How could you not want to come to a place like that?

When he came here he stayed with a family in town. There was only one hotel in town at the time, the hotel California. It was run by the original owners, the Tabasco family. Old Mr. Tabasco was still alive then. His wife and his daughters were quite young. So that was the only place to stay, but Tom told us not to stay there.

He had a rumor that he had built onto the house of Chuy Torres, next to the tortilleria on the highway. He still lives there. They had a big yard with a big shade tree, so they just set us up out there and then an extension cord out to our van. We camped right on their property.

We were accepted immediately when we came to town we didn’t have to find people and get to know them; Tom had brought us so we were just part of the family. It was a very nice introduction.

We would go to the beach. Tom was a surfer. He’d catch fish, come back and make ceviche. I learned how to make tortillas and frijoles with Lupita, the wife. We tried to help out as much as we could.

There was nothing planned. We just get up and do something every single day. We stayed here for perhaps six weeks. We stayed as long as Tom was in town; when he left we took off and headed south through Central America.

We went up to see the Yucatan and the ruins. We went down through Belize and Guatemala. Then we went back over to the Caribbean side of Guatemala. We made another family friendship in Guatemala City with a bunch of ex-pats. We went all the way through Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. We went as far as the road did. At that time the road didn’t go into South America. It does now, but it didn’t then.

We didn’t like Panama to much because they thought we were American, and it was a time of strong anti-American sentiment. We pasted maple leaves all over ourselves and our car so that people would know the difference!

We camped on beaches. In cities there were usually trailer Parks. In Guatemala City, we got a small apartment because we stayed there for quite awhile.

We were only worried one time, and that was in Guatemala on the beach in a place called La Libertad. We didn’t have a problem but there were some gutsy guys hanging around our camper at night. They were on the beach throwing their machetes around.

I was sort of aggressive because I was an emergency room nurse. I had an aggressive personality. Evelyn got a little bit afraid and told me not to say some things to these boys. So we just put the top down on our camper and drove away.

We did get robbed in Mexico City. We were on the bus going from the campground to the museum of natural history. A guard outside the museum who spoke good English told us to be careful that there had been some pickpockets in the area.

I thought that was very friendly of him. So we got on the bus and some really bad-looking guys got on the bus too. These guys got on, road one stop, and then got off. We had been standing on the bus because it was packed, but when they got off we were able to get a seat so we checked our purses. They had our wallets!

Evelyn had gotten a new purse made of thick Colombian leather. It was thick. Their knives must have been so sharp because they cut right through to our wallets.

Once again I lost my temper. I said: “come on! We’re getting off at the next stop! We’re going to find these guys!

Evelyn said: “do you know what cut the bottom of this purse?”

I said: “I don’t care. I want my money back!”

I got off at the next up and told a policeman. He rolled his eyes and gave us the look: “oh god, and other tourist.”

He told us where the embassy was and what we should do. We took some deep breaths and calmed down. I thought about what the crooks would do. They didn’t want our wallets; they only wanted the cash.

I thought: “there are only so many garbage cans between here and the museum.”

So here we were. We had worn our skirts that day and we were in the high-rent district of Mexico City going through garbage cans.

The second garbage can and guess what? I lifted up a piece of cardboard and there were our wallets! Both of them!

The only thing they had taken was the cash. Our passports were there, our credit cards were there, and even our traveler’s checks were there. We were lucky.

That was the only iffy experience we had.