Vanilla Thunder to Nuevo Laredo

Fear of flying and chronic procrastination compel Vanilla Thunder to undertake some bizarre adventures. In this case, Vanilla opted for the most complicated way to Puebla for a conference. Some people might have taken advantage of the new Aeromexico direct flight to Mexico City and bought their ticket at least four weeks before departure. Not Vanilla Thunder. He waits until two weeks, buys a flight out of San Antonio for $100 more than the quoted flight from Austin two weeks ago. Then, fearing that he won’t have time to write the paper for the conference, decides that he will take the bus and write the paper on the bus. Fear of getting on the damn plane factors in, too: he’s not going to lie.

He’s like the white guy on Snakes on a Plane who breaks out a couple of bars of Xanax before his honeymoon flight back from Hawaii. He’s terrified of the plane, but, in the end, he’s bitten by a hundred poisonous snakes while the plane arrives safely.

But that’s Vanilla Thunder. He’s always trying to simplify matters by—paradoxically enough—making them much more complicated than they need be. Which brings us back to V.T.’s trip to Puebla.

He cancels his flight and buys a ticket on the most luxurious, most suavecito, bus line in Mexico, ETN. ETN is unlike any bus in the U.S.A. On one aisle, it has only one seat that almost fully reclines (He tells R., his fiancée, that the seats fully recline. She asks how people don’t end up in each others’ laps. So he couches his claim: “they almost fully recline.”)