Yes.  That’s how close we finally are to being “wheels up”, as they say.  Tomorrow morning I go to meet my good friend Magda, whom I’ve known since I first came here, to get insurance, after which I proceed to another place to get my revisado (inspection), and from there, time depending, onto the municipal building to get my plates.

Well, I won’t actually have a plate.  What I will have is a permission slip that tells anyone who asks that I am waiting for my plate to arrive, but otherwise, everything is in order.

There was a potential issue with the fact that I had not had the car taken off registration, as I was supposed to…  registration doesn’t expire really, but you are supposed to have a revisado every year it is registered to be on the road.  Now…, if I had told them in 2009 that I wasn’t going to be back for several years, then no problem, but I dropped my crystal ball in customs that trip, and it wasn’t working properly when I left.  Quite common actually….

The long and the short of it is, that I had to get a piece of paper from a reputable place (may as well have been a photocopier), get them to put in writing that I had stored the car there all those years, that the car was broken and undriveable all that time, a bunch of work had been done, and now the car was good to go.  20 buks.

What that did was clear the way for me:

• not be charged the cost of six years worth of revisados, and
• allows me to get one tomorrow, after I get insurance.

Got all that?

Note, insurance, revisado, plates… errrr wait, not plates, they stamp out a new one every year for each car…  job creation y’see, so I get a note for plates, and then the plates come a while later.

As a bonus feature, because my plates expire in Enero (January), I’ll have to do all this fun stuff again in a few months, if I’m still around, which I just may be given the number of places I want to go in Panama before I even begin with Costly Rica.

On the bright side, basic insurance is $127 per year (and it doesn’t expire in January).  So there’s that.

No pictures, even though there was a helluva parade last night, with fireworks going off every 10 minutes or so all night long.  Thank you thank you thank you, Mr.Rooster.

I can’t tell you the number of times( in my head as I’m waking) that I’ve gone out and bought the things to make a slingshot to knock that bugger off his perch, because you can’t find them here no matter how hard you look…   but, yes, thank you, because now I can sleep through anything!!!