One of the great privileges of my caving career has been to go caving with Don Broussard, whether it be in Texas or Mexico. Not only is he a great caver and pitches in to help when help is needed, he’s also a great conversationalist. Ask him sometime about any one of those many Mexico caving expedition that were listed in a previous email message and you will be sure to learn something new, interesting and most likely amusing about the trip and its participants. Don often doesn’t volunteer lots of stories, but I’ve discovered over the years that he has a lot of stories to tell, you just need to ask him.
He’s also a great person to have riding in the back of your truck when you’re driving in Mexico. Here’s my favorite Mexico truck driving story that involves Don. We were driving back towards the States after an expedition to the Purificacion region. I was driving my Tundra with Bill Steele in the passenger front seat, Don Broussard and Adam Zuber were in the back seat, and the other vehicle that was caravanning with us was an almost identical Toyota Tundra truck driven by TAG caver Jim Smith. It was at night, and we were looking for what Steele called “a Strickland-approved campsite” that would be private, close to the main road, and not cost anything (or very much). Several miles back I had seen a sign that indicated there was a camping area ahead, and as we came to a Y-intersection, I noticed that I had made the wrong choice, and we wanted to actually take the other road. There was a restaurant with a large parking lot up ahead on the right that I could easily pull into and turn around, but I didn’t notice the Mexican police car in the parking lot. After I performed the maneuver, everyone else in the vehicle had seen the police car and started yelling at me to stop, the police car was now following us, and we were sure to have to pay him a mordita (bribe/fine). When I pulled over into the nearest available off-road space, Don and Adam immediately jumped out of the truck and ran back to talk to the police officer. Steele and I couldn’t figure out what they were doing, so we waited. After a few minutes, they both climbed back into the truck and related a hilarious story about how they immediately started asking the police officer if he could help them locate the camping area. Since neither was very fluent in Spanish, this involved a lot of hand-waving and gestures and very rudimentary Spanish. We think that the officer was so surprised and flustered by a bunch of gringos excitedly asking him for help that he forgot to ask for money, but he did inform them that the camping area we were looking for was several hours down the road. With that information, we drove away and found a closer place to camp that night. Of course I received a lot of ribbing about my driving during the rest of the trip back to the border. Diana ************************************************** Diana R. Tomchick Professor Departments of Biophysics and Biochemistry University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center 5323 Harry Hines Blvd. Rm. ND10.214A Dallas, TX 75390-8816 [email protected] (214) 645-6383 (phone) (214) 645-6353 (fax) ________________________________ UT Southwestern Medical Center The future of medicine, today. _______________________________________________ Texascavers mailing list | http://texascavers.com [email protected] | Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ http://lists.texascavers.com/listinfo/texascavers
