There is always a way if you look for it, the old saying says (I think). But my mom might have just proved it wrong. She found it all right, she just didn’t know what it was called.

Our resort was in Playa Del Carmen, a bit over an hour from Cancun, where she had gone shopping. She had spent a fun day, walking the long aisle of five-star hotels, seeing the splendor.

And now she wanted to come home.

But she couldn’t. She didn’t know where “home” was.

What would she do? My mom thought about it, standing in the bus station. To save money, she had bought bus tickets to come to Cancun. Now she wanted to go back. But how?

The ticket-selling man watched her impatiently. My mom held out her wristband, the sign for “all inclusive” at our resort, the Grand Coco Bay. “I need to go here,” she said.

“Sorry,” the ticket seller said in broken English, “I not sale tickets go to Riviera Maya” (he eyed the words on the wristband, for Riviera Maya was a general area and had many stations in it) “because I need more precise location. Maybe you think over there?” He pointed next to the ticket line. There were other people that actually knew where they needed to go. They needed to be served.

My mom looked hopeless. How would she know what the city was called?

Sixty miles away, my dad and I had come back from our scuba diving trip. We were exhausted and not surprised to find no one in the hotel room. My mom was still in Cancun.

“I wonder if my mom knows the name of the city?” my dad commented, “She’ll have to in order to get back to the Playa Del Carmen bus station.”

“Hmm. I bet she doesn’t,” I replied.

And we were right. Back at the bus station, my mom was frantically flipping through her “phone book” (it was just a huge notebook fashioned out of an old diary). A twenty dollar bill fell out. She snatched it up. Two business cards fell out. If only they were cards for the hotel.

And then the bus ticket for “Playa Del Carmen –> Cancun Downtown” fell out. It was the ticket she had bought to come to Cancun.

So happy, she jumped in line and got to the ticketing counter. “I want ticket to here,” she cried. The ticketing man smiled. “You find out!” he said, grinning, as he handed my mom her ticket.