El Carro, Mal

by Dan

Our car with its snorkel, having made it through the hurricanes and floods and various other rigours of Central America, was recently defeated by Maeve and her visiting Nana (both very well meaning of course) washing the car with a hose.  After all, a black pipe is a logical thing to fill with water!  I now know how to take the air filter off and remove water, and I also know that the car will start again easily afterwards.  One for the skill set.

A week or two before that, the radiator developed a very dramatic hole, so that when refilled it sprayed out everywhere.  Although it meant a walk to the local mechanico, the kind of problem that's pretty easy to deal with. 

The other rigours of Nosara include very rough roads, though, and the next thing was not as easy to deal with... about half way to Liberia to meet our friends Patti and Rich and family, amid worsening rear end vibrations, all the wheel studs on the rear passenger side decided to break at once.  I had just removed the other rear tire to inspect it before we left... oops, wrong side. 

We learned how to say "tow truck" (and a few other things) in Spanish, with the help of a local/American guy and a tour van driver who stopped to help.  As you can see from the photos, it was raining, although we had thought the season over! We had the car towed to Nicoya, where Patty and I retrieved it a couple of days later after its pretty simple repair.  We hired the tour van driver to drive us to Liberia to meet our guests, and return us to Nosara.  Now the car is back in our driveway, and back to its normal state of generally but not all that urgently needing repair.  So all ends well!