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Stranded on the side of the road in the mountains of Zacatecas, Mexico was about the last place I expected to find myself, but there I was. Seventeen years old with nothing but a Cannon XL1 strapped to my back and five pesos in my pocket. I have no cell phone and the classic car race I was filming a documentary for sped past me, along with all the chase cars, and Policia escorting us. The support crew tasked with picking me up never showed. I was on my own. I’m not exactly sure what I thought I was doing. I could have easily turned around and walked back to town. But the finish line was in Nuevo Laredo, nearly 700 kilometers north of the mountain road I was stranded on. So I started walking. I didn’t get far before a cabbie pulled to the side of the road. A lost teenage girl stranded on the side of the road in Mexico must have made a sad sight. He insisted that I couldn’t walk where I was going. I insisted that I had no dinero. This broken Spanish-English disagreement went on for about ten minutes before I decided I had to take a chance or I’d never make it home. For the better part of an hour, this stranger tried to figure out who I was and where I was going. At some point, his brother joined us because we thought he might speak English (he didn’t). I was able to communicate that my hotel was next to a church. With that useless bit of information, my driver (eventually) found my hotel next to Catedral de Zacatecas. It didn’t take long for the front desk to track down the producer of the documentary I was filming. They were ahead of me shooting the lead vehicles, desperate to get the first racer to cross the finish line. She would later tell me how unsettling it is to drive into a Pemex for fuel and have a confused station attendant had you a phone. We were able to have the hotel charge the card on file (remember, I have no wallet, no i.d., nada), for bus fare and a few pesos to last me until Nuevo Laredo. I figured my journey was just about over. So I didn’t expect to find myself on the side of the road with the state policía desperately trying to explain myself. If you have ever traveled through Mexico, you know there are 32 states. Each with its own military-grade checkpoint, sometimes at random on the highways. At each checkpoint, you have to show your ID, state your business and your destination. On the trip down, it was super easy to explain who we were and what we were doing. We had a race car strapped to a flatbed trailer that was hooked to a school bus we had converted into a “motorhome”. Yes, we were a little bit redneck in our efforts, but you make a documentary film on a threadbare budget and get back to me, ok? This time, they stopped the bus full of tourists, locals and me. The policía asked people at random for their identification. My red hair and baby face stood out like a sore thumb, so I was asked for what I didn’t have and escorted off the bus. As I stood there unable to communicate with federal employees who I was and where I was going, I vowed that I would learn Spanish if I ever got out of this mess. Someone must have radioed someone in authority to confirm my story because they suddenly dismissed me and I was back on the bus rolling towards Nuevo Laredo. It was after dark by the time I made it there. The race was over, and I had missed the celebrations entirely. Pierre de Thoisy from France had won for the 4th year in a row, after his engine caught fire. The car I was following for the documentary also crossed the finish line, a pretty amazing accomplishment. And, by some miracle of the day, I was no longer stranded on the side of a mountain road in Mexico.