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We split our time between Mexico and the U.S., but I feel like I spend as much time traveling between the two as I do in either place. Part of that is just the stress inherent to travel, and how no two trips are the same, even when they’re almost identical on paper.

Case in point. This trip: We flew to Mexico yesterday. And though it was mostly the same, it was also mostly different.

? Plans change

The week before we leave for Mexico is always hectic, but this trip was further complicated by my daughter last week when she unexpectedly passed the final class she needed to graduate from college, meaning we suddenly need to be in North Carolina in early August for the graduation. (This was unexpected to me because no one told me that she had retaken the class during the summer semester; I had expected this to happen in the fall.) We had booked this trip for July 8 through August 28, or about 7 weeks, so we could be back in Pennsylvania for the Labor Day weekend.

Well, that’s all screwed up. The most likely outcome here is that we just fly home a few days before the graduation and then stay in PA until the next time we go to Mexico (most likely late September through late November). But there’s a small possibility that we’ll fly to/from North Carolina from here.

? What I brought

That’s a problem for another day, but it did impact what I brought with me here, mostly in a good way. I like to travel light, and thanks to us keeping clothes and anything else we need in the apartment in Mexico City, that means I can travel even lighter than usual. Except, of course, that I also had to bring the next set of review laptops with me. I had raced to finish up my oldest pending laptop reviews before we left–I published three reviews over the long weekend before the trip–and so that narrowed the field nicely. But because we are almost certainly coming back to PA earlier than originally planned, it also meant I could lighten the load a bit. So I came here with the next two review laptops instead of three or four.

I also brought my MacBook Air, mostly because I’m using the latest ’26 betas across my iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TVs and want to keep up on that while exploring SwiftUI. And it’s quite thin.

I can fit four laptops in my HP Renew backpack, along with my phones, charging cables, Beats Studio Pro headphones, passports, and so on. And all I needed in my luggage was a few dress shirts, one pair of shorts, a few pairs of socks, and a small toiletry bag. Which was good, because it left room for me to bring some more electronics, which is always a pain:

• A 15-inch USB-C display that I’ve wanted to bring for quite some time
• A pair of Viture XR glasses that Stephen Rose lent me (more on that soon)
• A Nixive MagGrip Mini Tripod Pro that I had purchased to replace a cheap mini-tripod I had in Mexico
• Various CPAP supplies
• Several CAT-8 Ethernet cables (I will be writing about this soon as well)
• Other assorted electronics

I have to say, I was surprised my bags went through the security X-ray machine without requiring a hand inspection. I can only imagine what that must have looked like.

✈️ Different airline, different airport

We have flown between the U.S. and Mexico City exclusively on United because we have status and there are two daily non-stops from Newark. But for this trip, we tried something new: Aeromexico now offers non-stop flights between Philadelphia, which is maybe a bit closer from a drive-time perspective, and Mexico City. Because this is a new route, the prices were good. And we’ve had good experiences on this airline flying within Mexico.

The flight was a great experience: We were able to sit in the first row and had priority boarding, so I had no issues getting our bags planted right in the front and getting organized without having an underseat area in front of me. I spent most of the flight writing what became What Exactly is Xbox Now? (Premium). In fact, I almost finished it before landing, so I posted it from the airport afterward.

The arrival experience wasn’t as positive. On previous trips, we’ve always landed at Terminal 1 in the Benito Juarez (Mexico City) airport, and we’ve never had a line or any wait in customs. But Aeromexico lands in Terminal 2, and there we faced an incredibly long line for extranjeros–foreigners–that I wasn’t entirely sure we needed to wait in. We did, for a bit. But I finally saw that the room had recently been reorganized and that the sign for those with residency, like us, was in the wrong place. So we went over to the line-less Mexican side and sailed right through.

? Packed away

We normally leave our apartment as-is, with our clothes in drawers and electronics lightly packed away mostly to protect them from dust. But this time, we had a different experience. We don’t normally rent our apartment, and we don’t have a listing on Airbnb or any other rental services. But Steph is part of a Mexico City Facebook group and had seen a request there from a journalist and it ended up working out. So this woman stayed in our apartment for about two months, from early May to early July. And that meant we needed to pack up all our personal items and put them up in our storage room on the roof of the building.

This was a hassle when we left, and it was a hassle when we arrived. And she somehow managed to break two of our big window blinds, plus a few glasses. But I guess it mostly worked out.

? PCs

As noted above, I came to Mexico City with the next two review laptops plus my MacBook Air, and I had left three used HP laptops behind in the apartment. Between those laptops and my iPad with Magic Keyboard, I shouldn’t have any issues getting work done while I’m here. But each time I come back, I go through the same time-consuming process of getting the laptops that stay here back up-to-date. I’m not sure why, but I’m always surprised by how long this takes.

To make this happen, I set up shop on the bed, plugging the three laptops into power and giving them a few minutes to collect themselves–they’re all x64 PCs, so they don’t just wake up immediately after sitting unused for two months–before powering each on. In each case, I had configured Windows Hello facial recognition, and in each case, that failed, forcing me to enter a PIN. (Again. x64.) And then I just ran Windows Update and watched as the screen on each filled up with enough updates to run past the bottom. I also went into Advanced options > Optional updates and found 1 to 7 more updates there, mostly drive and firmware updates, and added those to the queue on each. And then I let that run on each laptop while I did a bit of writing on one of the review laptops, occasionally swiping the touchpad on each to keep the screens on.

Yes, this is how I spend my time. This process took almost an hour. Which, again, always amazes me. When I had exhausted the updating possibilities in Windows Update and rebooted each PC at least once, I then turned to the Microsoft Store to install app updates. This also took a long time, at least on two of the PCs. (I can’t explain this, but one of them only installed a handful of app updates despite repeated re-checks.) And then I opened Terminal with admin privileges and ran winget upgrade –all –silent on each to literally update everything remaining on each PC. Total time spent babysitting these laptops was over 2.5 hours.

Again, this always surprises me.

? Blink camera

One year ago, I installed a Blink Outdoor 4 camera on our balcony in Mexico City so that we could check in on the sunsets when we were away. It worked flawlessly until mid-May, about a week after we came home from our previous trip here. On May 14, I received a notification on my phones that the Blink sync module was offline.

I figured the woman staying in the apartment must have just unplugged the module, which is a small white box that connects to the camera over Wi-Fi and is powered over USB. I leave it in the kitchen, so it wasn’t difficult to imagine she had simply needed the power port for something else. So I asked Stephanie to text her to plug it back in.

Well, she hadn’t unplugged the module, go figure. And unplugging it and re-plugging it in didn’t help. So I figured I’d look at it when we came back. In the meantime, I had a to-do about the Blink camera batteries, which are just normal AAA batteries and would likely need to be replaced soon. So I looked that up and decided to just get a Battery Expansion Pack that costs $29.99, holds four AAA batteries, and clips onto the back of the camera.

I looked at the sync module the morning after we arrived. It has two lights, one green and one blue, and the blue one was blinking wildly in what I took to be its way of signaling a problem. Unplugging/replugging didn’t work, so I clicked the error message in the Blink app and went through the limited troubleshooting choices. In the end, I just had to reset it and it came back quickly. Granted, this has to be done in person and isn’t something I could have done remotely.

With the sync module restored, I tapped the live preview thumbnail at the top of the Blink app just to make sure the camera was working OK. I noticed it now said “394d ago” in the corner of the thumbnail, which must point to the date the camera was installed. But when I never got a live image to come up. There was something wrong with the camera too.

Which was fine, I had to install that battery expansion pack anyway. So I unmounted the camera from the corner of the balcony, brought it inside, cleaned off the gunk that had collected over the past year under the little hood I had added to the camera to protect it, and took a look. Hilariously, the batteries had died. Which, again, was fine. I was going to replace them anyway.

Basically, I just had to remove the back cover, take out the batteries, insert the expansion back onto the back of the camera, screw it on tight, and add the four batteries. I tested it at that point just in case and the live image, this time of my living room, came up immediately. So I put the back cover on again and then brought the camera back out to the balcony. So it’s back where it belongs and everything works normally again.

?️ And … yeah

And just like that, it’s been … one day. We’re not sure when we’re going back, but we’re sure that this trip will feel short regardless, given our previous visit of almost four months. But that’s OK. We’ll be back. And forth. And back and forth. Again and again. That seems to be our lives now.