Go South, Episode 3: Finding Family

One hundred days, 16 countries, 12,000 miles by motorcycle—and it’s the first border crossing that proves troublesome.

It costs $400 to get into Mexico, and Pat Sherwood’s credit card is frozen. Ralph the credit-card representative didn’t seem to care about the pricey international call to sort out the situation.

“I just wanted to crush my phone, fly on a plane, punch Ralph in the face and drive back down,” Sherwood says.

Afterward, it was on to Hermosillo, Mexico, where Sherwood and companion Ian Wittenber planned to stay at an RV park off a highway. But when they arrived, it was “a ghost town.”

“Sun’s going down. We have, we know no one here. I’m, I don’t know. We gotta figure out where the hell we’re gonna stay tonight. Right now it’s not looking good—a little grim,” a frustrated Sherwood says.

So he took to Twitter as @PatSherwood215. Ticko Lohr and Fermin Villalba, of CrossFit 52 Hermosillo, answered the distress call.

The generosity was overwhelming, Sherwood says.

“You almost can’t put it into words until you experience it. It means the world. It means the world when total strangers just open their arms and say, ‘Come on over. You do CrossFit, we do CrossFit, love the community. You’re family now,’” he recounts. “CrossFit is alive and well in Mexico. Alive and well.”

Video by Ian Wittenber.

8min

HD file size: 149 MB
SD mov file size: 56 MB

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Additional reading: “Taking the Time for the Time of Your Life” by Pat Sherwood, published Sept. 16, 2013.