Wheels Up

OMG, finally, and so easy.  Yesterday morning we met up with Magda, so her insurance company could look over my car.  They took a few pictures here and there, and within a 1/2 hour or so I had the papers in hand.  From there, we went to another place for the revisado, which was little more than a formality and another eleven dollars out of my pocket, and Bob’s your Uncle, we were done.  This was all done by 9:30, and we were both in shock.

The day before that, Pepo had taken me to the home of the Boss Lady at the municipal building, I thanked her for seeing me in her home on her day off, we sat and talked for a bit, and so when Pepo and I showed up at the municipal building to get the rest, she waved us right past the whole line up, some fifteen people deep, and dealt with us herself.  I was more than just a little embarrassed at that, but what can you do?  We bounced around a few more windows, and by noon that day, I had all the papers I needed to roll around Panama legal schmegal.  The only catch is that because my plates expire in January, 25th to be precise, it is too late in the year to issue a 2015 plate, but the papers I was given were as good a plate, and come the 25th, I’d have to come back and do it again.

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Can You Smell It?

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….

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The Morning After

Edit:  The video will have to wait a few more days.  Vimeo has a 500 MB upload limit per week.  Tick tik

Noisy bastards vid…

Yesterday was Black Friday, otherwise known as “the Friday before Thanksgiving in the states”, which has since morphed into this heavily promoted gargantuan consumer feeding frenzy, as a result of corporate influence world wide.  We didn’t even have that scourge in Canada until three years ago.

Now, we’re bombarded with weeks of advertising prior to it, and you can just bet that Zerohedge has some videos today of people getting trampled at Walmart or something.  Here, they’ve been mentioning it on the TV since we arrived in Panama City five weeks ago, has been strengthening all along, and reached full on saturation yesterday.
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Is this bad?

LOL  That is a radial tire, believe it or not.  Canadian made, It is supposed to look flat on the bottom, regardless of whether it is on or off the ground.  It did when it was new, and rode beautifully.

Radial tires are steel belted, meaning they have steel running the circumference of the tire at the tread (and radially) which keeps it from ballooning out like that.

This is what Central American roads, and heat (don’t forget the heat), do to tires down here.  They are so rough in places, they beat the crap out of your tires, that the steel wires the belts are composed of break.  All that is left holding your tire together is the rubber (balloon).  They hold air alright, but riding around on them at low speed is a steering adventure, as they have lost all uniformity, and wobble the car ridiculously as though you have 4 bent rims.

Hey, I fit right in!
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