Travels in a Tin Can

We saw a lot of these officers, but fortunately avoided being stopped by them,
other than for routine border checks. One such check took place on New
Year's Day, even though we were not crossing a border at the time.
We were very confused when we saw the security post set up across
the road, somewhere in Arizona. We were even more puzzled by the
conversation we had with the young policeman who approached us.
'Just the two of you in there today?' He asked in a casual manner (imagine a
Huckleberry Hound voice).
'Yes' we replied, in a ‘please do not shoot us’ manner.
'Nobody in the back?'
'No'
'No drugs?'
'No'
'Any aliens?'
'Er, no'
'Ok, on you go'
He never even looked in the van.
Later we realized it must have been to check for illegal immigrants entering
the US from nearby Mexico.
The second external distraction was other traffic, generally
unobtrusive, but once or twice a little too exciting with near crashes. The worst
of these occurred when a truck up ahead shed some of its load and before we
could say 'better avoid going over that or we'll have a blow-out', someone else
hit it and one of their tires exploded rather spectacularly.
It was also quite exciting whenever we drove into new time zones.