The last three days have been dense and kinetic. Thursday: Los Angeles, Friday: Guadalajara, Saturday, Puerto Vallarta. Finally, as I write this, there’s quiet.

I’m sitting on the totally whatever couch of our totally fine AirBNB, looking out at the sun rising over the steeple of the sleepy yellow church across the street. I hear motorbikes, mourning doves, and the keys of my MacBook, and that’s all. For now.

Thursday, I woke up to our last day in LA for awhile. I walked Zeby, my Husky mix, on a one-mile loop around my neighborhood that I’ve walked hundreds of times: with her, with her predecessor, with my youngest in his stroller. In an attempt to create better habits, I kept my phone in my pocket and did my best to be present for this farewell to the familiar. Thank you for always being there, crack in the pavement. Thanks for making me feel better about my own home’s imperfections, unfinished lawn. Thanks for your dark and incongruous reminder of my mortality, weirdo neighbor’s recently-acquired hearse.

I lived in Mar Vista for thirteen years, longer by double than any other place I’ve lived in my life. Long enough to feel like I was a part of the place. Long enough that the place is a part of me.

As I rounded the corner home, I saw the neighbor’s nanny walking their two-year-old to the same playground my kids spent their toddler years. Like my youngest, my neighbor’s son has blond hair, bright blue eyes, and an easy smile. He lit up when he spotted Zeby and rushed to greet her when we heard a thump followed by a scream.

I ran across the street, where a woman in her seventies lay face down on the sidewalk, her head in a palm-sized pool of blood, her small dog eyeing her nervously. She was struggling to get to her feet.

“Are you okay?” I asked, offering her a hand.

“No, she’s not okay!” Said the neighbor’s nanny, catching up to us, “She’s bleeding!”

“Can I look?” I asked. The old lady nodded and I swept back her hair, revealing a gash in her forehead, just over her left eyebrow. There was blood all over her face, her jacket, her little sky-blue leatherette purse, a clear lucite keychain with her name engraved on it, and now my hands. Her Apple Watch was sounding a fall alert.

“We need to call you an ambulance.” Said the nanny.

“No, no, I’m alright. I’m just around the corner and my husband’s home.”

“Can I call your husband?” I offered. She gave me his number and I dialed. The first and second attempts, he didn’t pick up. By the third attempt, he’d blocked my number.

The neighbor whose sidewalk the old lady was bleeding on, ran out to offer help. He too, logically, offered an ambulance. She declined. Her watch was already calling 9-1-1. I asked the neighbor to hold the woman steady while I ran to my house to get a chair for her to sit in. He’s a tall, athletic man – a former professional basketball player, but I could tell he had a thing about blood. He gingerly held her up with a grip on her less-bloody side.

By the time I returned with a chair, 9-1-1 had offered the old lady an ambulance and she’d declined it. The nanny kept insisting we call back. I pushed back, gently, because ambulances are expensive. The old lady turned down a ride to a hospital, to urgent care, even home.

Eventually, she agreed to let me walk her home. I took her dog and we walked to her apartment, chatting and waving to the people we passed: me in last night’s makeup and wild, unbrushed hair, her pressing a blood-soaked towel to her forehead. A heart-warming tableau directed by Rob Zombie.

When we arrived at her apartment, her husband was at the computer.

I said, “She had a bad fall. She needs stitches. A CAT scan would probably be a good idea. She hit her head hard.”

He said, “I’m on a Zoom.”

I ran home to do a Zoom of my own with my boss, still wild-looking and disheveled. I had just enough time to wash the blood off of my hands. It was 10am.

At lunch, Krista and I made a final run to our storage unit to put the last few valuable things we could remember away for safekeeping. She went to sell her car (I’d sold mine the night before). Everything else we planned to keep was squeezed into two suitcases and one carry-on each. I finished the work day.

We listed all the things that we hadn’t sold, stored, or squeezed into our luggage on the local “Buy Nothing” Facebook group and told people that they could come over and take anything they saw. At 5:30, the chaotic potlatch began as strangers swarmed the house, taking clothes, furniture, appliances, office supplies, tools, everything.

A coven of tipsy middle-aged women told me they had tequila shots before coming over. They brought along a younger friend from the Pacific Palisades, staying with them while evacuating from the fires. She took Krista’s clothes, our copy of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, and some of our old trucker hats.

Along the way, I realized we hadn’t packed away my grandmother’s China. Too late, it went to a stranger. A quilt from the 1800s, given to me by the same grandmother to comfort me after my first divorce - gone. I felt the pang of nostalgia, the desire to save these unused artifacts of family and love, and said goodbye.

At 8pm, I kicked everyone out. I sent a few last emails. I triple-checked our “leaving America” checklist. I showered, tossing my dirty clothes into a discard pile. I went to bed at 10. I woke up at 1am to do a little laundry. At 3am, our car picked us up to take us to LAX.

We hit our first snag while checking our bags. My first goal in travel was to be safely outside of the US for the inauguration, just in case Donald “Dictator on Day One” Trump’s promise to “eliminate transgender lunacy” on the 20th would prohibit my ability to leave the country with my current documents. The 17th felt like a safe buffer, and I booked the only Aeromexico flights that would take a fat dog (Zeby) in the hold. We would fly from LA to Mexico City, fly from Mexico City to Guadalajara, and then drive to the queer beach paradise of Puerto Vallarta.

When we checked in it was too hot in Guadalajara for Zeby to fly safely. Krista had a support-animal letter from a doctor (for her Chihuahua, Pancake) and did some legerdemain to convince the check-in staff that Zeby was her support dog. We stuffed 70lbs of Husky mix under the seats in front of us and left LA.

As we broke through the clouds, I looked for smoke from the fires, but couldn't see any.

The plane turned south. I watched the familiar coastline of California pass by the window, replaced by Mexico: cities, mountains, desert. I felt something I hadn’t felt since committing misdemeanors in high school. The feeling that came after the prank, the shoplifting, the vandalism. After the run from the angry dad, the Taco Bell manager, the cops… After getting home and waiting for a call to my mom, or a knock on the door… After catching my breath, after my heart stopped racing. We got away with it. We escaped!

This is, of course, a fantasy and a choice, both of which I’ve embraced. I hope that all of this is spectacularly silly. I hope that Trump is more focused on plundering the American economy than he is on persecuting America’s marginalized communities. But “you’re overreacting” speaks less to my soul than “Run for your life!” and the mass deportations are supposed to start in Chicago on Tuesday.

In the words of my ex-wife’s therapist: “More to be revealed.”

At CDMX, we deplaned to a flight attended lovingly telling Zeby “¡Adios, gordo!” We passed through customs. Zeby befriended a Mexican customs drug-sniffing dog. We checked in for the Mexico City to Guadalajara leg of our journey and Krista repeated the charm offensive at the check-in desk and got Zeby onto our second flight as a service animal.

It turned out the second flight was on the same plane with the same crew as the first. They lit up when they saw Zeby again. As we boarded, we were greeted with “¡Hola, gordo!” and felt like old friends.

With a lot of bad Spanish and helpful airport staff, we made it to the Hertz counter, got our SUV and loaded the dogs and the bags in for the drive to Puerto Vallarta. It was here that a night of wrong turns began. I went right instead of left and had to park in front of some kind of police office to wait for my phone to connect with a local cell tower and download the maps.

We turned around, got into Friday night rush-hour traffic and realized that we only had a quarter tank of gas. Crawling along among the 18-wheelers, buses, National Guard trucks and motorbikes, I decided we’d refill when we got out of town, out of traffic. An hour later, we turned off of the main road onto the highway to Puerto Vallarta.

It felt good to be moving. We drove another half an hour or so before we got the “low fuel” warning. We were in the country, all we saw were small farmhouses, but there were lights in the distance where it seemed like we’d find gas and make the rest of the drive to the coast.

But, before we reached the lights of whatever town that was, we reached the first toll booth. Whoops. We sheepishly explained to the friendly tollbooth attendant that we didn’t have pesos but could pay with a card. He explained that he couldn’t take a card but it was no problem. He found someone in the line of cars behind us willing to convert a twenty-dollar bill to pesos at a fair exchange rate. We paid the toll. We had change. Things were looking good.

We exited and a few miles down a country road we found a gas station with a giant billboard advertising that they accepted Visa, Mastercard and a dozen other forms of payment that I didn’t recognize. Perfect. We pulled up to the attendant. “¿Podemos pagar con tarjeta?”

She told us that, unfortunately, they only accepted cash. We handed her our change from the tollbooth and left with a half-full tank.

Apple Maps tried to route us back to the toll road, charting a loop from the divided country road that would get us back onto the main route. We exited the paved highway onto a flat dirt road through a few small industrial buildings and into what looked, in the darkness of the night, like farmland. Every turn the map suggested was progressively more unhinged and rugged, taking us offroading down what looked like the driveways of houses hidden behind high walls and eventually telling us to turn right onto a road that had been blocked by wooden posts and some strands of barbed wire.

In the States, this kind of neighborhood would be reserved for people going to great lengths to be left the fuck alone. In Mexico? We had no context and assumed that we were just a fun surprise. When we reached the first dead end, we encountered the first people we’d seen in miles: a dude on a dirtbike riding away from a dude in a truck in the middle of nowhere. We smiled and waved to whoever they were. We couldn’t really see them in the cloud of dust the truck kicked up as it drove away. Apple Maps said to go back the way we came, which meant following the truck down the lonely road, which we did for awhile, making an improvised desert convoy.

At Siri’s instruction, we broke away from our pursuit of the truck, making a hairpin turn past a small outcropping of industrial buildings and a small row of houses. We adjusted our speed to avoid spraying dust on a cute young couple walking from one unlit building to another, again waving as though we intended to be where we were.

When we left the strand of houses, the dust kicked up more intensely, the road fading in and out of view through the clouds - a David Lynch fever dream. “Watch out, babe!” Krista warned me, “A horse!”

A guy was riding a horse, from where to where God knows. Again, we smiled and waved as though any of this made sense. He gave us a cowboy nod, and we drove on.

Past the man on horseback were more dirtbikes, riding recreationally on the route we were using to make the world’s longest u-turn. We let them pass, following them down an embankment and through a culvert beneath the highway. Emerging from the culvert, we narrowly avoided a head-on collision with another off-roader, this one on an ATV. Another smile, another wave, three more hairpin turns and we were back on the road, now headed in the right direction, to the toll road.

Our success at offroading had gone to our heads. We pulled up to the second tollbooth and explained as we had to the first attendant:

“Lo siento, sólo tenemos dólares americanos.”

She didn’t find us a charming as the first attendant had. She responded dryly “Lo siento, solo acepto pesos mexicanos.” She leaned on “pesos mexicanos” for emphasis and she wasn’t wrong to judge us.

If I were fluent in Spanish, I might have said something like “We’re the worst, right? And American, too, which I can totally see must be the most obnoxious kind of person to be bouncing through the Mexican desert asking for favors, but can I tell you about my day?” And we would have laughed and bonded and worked it out.

But, I am not remotely fluent in Spanish. So, I stared at her, dumbly. Krista said, in English, “What are we supposed to do?”

The attendant instructed us to back up, turn around, and go find a bank. I put the address for the nearest ATM into Apple Maps, we headed in that direction and passed an enormous burning bush, sending flames twenty feet into the desert night. The nearby brush was starting to burn, too. It was a surreal echo of the burning city we’d left behind, biblical and awful, extinguishing what was left of our appetite for adventure.

We missed the hairpin that would have taken us to the bank, and when we zoomed out to see the new Apple Maps direction, it was, another labyrinth of off-roading. “Babe,” I sighed to Krista, defeated, “Can you find a dog-friendly hotel in Guadalajara? I don’t think I can do this.”

We returned to Guadalajara, defeated, and checked into the adorable Hotel Indigo. We walked the dogs in a pretty park near the hotel. We broke our commitment to dry January with wine and cocktails on the rooftop bar. We ate esquites with bone marrow. We ate boneless Buffalo wings. We slept hard.

We ate breakfast in Guadalajara at the enormous and ridiculously tasty Santa Coyote buffet, filled our tank with gas, our wallets with cash, and got back on the road.

The drive from Guadalajara to Puerto Vallarta is beautiful: fields of agave give way to mountains and forests, which in turn become jungles with glimpses of the Pacific through the valleys. I saw my first “jaguar crossing” sign.

As Krista napped, I put on a fledgling playlist of songs that make running away feel like an adventure: The Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider,” Cage the Elephant’s “No Rest for the Wicked,” M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” and 100 Gec’s “The Most Wanted Person in The United States.” After the election and months of being propagandized about, villainized, and scapegoated, a day as a random American on a Mexican highway felt deliciously free.

We made it to Puerto Vallarta earlier than we expected, and while our host wasn’t around, our neighbors told us we could get our keys from the carniceria on the corner. We did a run for groceries, Krista full of energy, me ready to collapse and cry. It was maybe the most married I’ve felt yet. We returned the rental car late and dirty and everyone at Hertz was cool about it.

Last night we celebrated again, giving ourselves permission to take a second night off from dry January. We made friends with our waiter when I caught him dancing when he thought nobody was looking. Saturday was his last day of work, and he was planning to spend his day off celebrating his wife’s birthday with his two kids who were home from college. And as we shared a little happiness, he told us he was a poet, and borrowed my phone so he could share the English translation of his book with me.

His name is Gabino Bernal Ruiz. Here’s the page he shared from his book “The World Changes and We are a Part of It”:

Be well with this week’s clown show, friends. The world changes. We are a part of it. And life goes on and on.