The Little Grape that Could

Well, after an interesting day on Tuesday, we have a vehicle. We can't say how happy we are to have freedom of movement.  We just used it this morning to jump in and chase down a pickup full of fresh veggies down the road (we's gots to has our veggies). The truck was hilarious, it had a grocery store scale hanging off the tailgate.

Anyways, we ended up with a little Toyota Tacoma, pretty much anything else was prohibitively expensive. I thought of 100 clever ways to write this next fact, but let's be honest here... it's purple. I don't know why on God's green earth, any car manufacturer would make a four-wheel drive truck that is a pretty light blue-purple, but Toyota certainly did. We're not only "the gringos" now, but we're the gringos rolling into town in a lavender truck. Awesome...

 This photo is pretty forgiving of the color.

But really, it's a great vehicle in phenomenal condition for here. For those of you that know the road to Canchias, we went out there yesterday, but now it takes more than half an hour to get there because all the roads have washed out from the unusually heavy rains this wet season, so we took it for it's maiden voyage. However, the little grape did a great job getting to and from. What these people do with two-wheel drive down here amazes me though, coming back, we passed a little minibus coming up the same mountain road, through the streams, ruts and all. Ridiculous. Apparently, as much as we Americans like our cars, we're sissies with  how we use them. Everyday, we see little tiny 1980s 4-cylinder trucks loaded down with well over a ton of bananas/coconuts/cinder blocks/wood going up slick mountain roads. The sounds that come out of them are just as amazing the vehicles.

Since then, we've ridden with our mechanic for about an hour on back roads, and it performed admirably with him pretending like he was in the final laps of a World Rally Championship race. At one point (at a particularly huge crater in the road, we were on 3 or 2 wheels), he told me to drive carefully, and take care of the truck. If "driving carefully" involves driving like that, I'm sure I'll manage.

This is the official end of semi-interesting material unless you care about what the process for purchasing a car looks like down here.

The process went fairly well. We decided it would be best for their only to be one chele (white person- from their word for milk) looking at cars at once, so Stacey stayed back, and Kaleb went with a couple of guys from Honduras to check some out. Luis, a guy here, ended up having a friend with the truck we bought. We went, drove it around a little, checked out every number in every document they had (approximately 13 times) and bartered a little bit. Then we went to the bank (where we had an account) to transfer the money. Apparently, unless you want to die, you don't carry a big check or lots of money in San Pedro Sula. So, we went to the bank, waited in the line outside, then the line inside, then at the counter, for almost 2 hours. From there, we got the signature and ID of the owner at a legal office to verify the transfer. Next week, we'll go to a lawyer, since we're not nationals, and complete the transfer into our name. A little different here, haha.