Yippee, kinda, sorta

The yippee part being that we got the truck back at last and its running great. They even threw in a free vacuuming and car wash in the bargain.

The kinda, sorta part was that because of the changes in the value of peso/dollar recently we ended up paying a couple of hundred dollars more than we thought. So, all in all it cost a little more than $4,400 USD.

Thankfully, we had the vast majority of the money in our rainy day fund and our vacation fund, so no more rain and no vacations, and we ended up having to put some of the cost on the Visa card. Bummer. Lord willing we hope to pay it off soon.

Funny thing about paying the Ford dealer though. Mazatlan is a town of nearly 400,000 people. This is a huge, new, modern dealership complete with showroom, repair garage, body shop, parts store, the whole deal. When I went in to the cashier to pay and explained that I wanted to divide the payment between our debit card and our credit card she said no problem and I handed over the cards expecting her to swipe them and be on my merry way.

I must have completely lost track of where I am. No swiper here, no indeed. She needed to call for the authorization number, spent 15 minutes on hold and then when they answered and found it was a foreign card they switched her to someone else. She finally got the authorization number and then had to dial another number for the other card, pretty much the same result. Lots of time on hold, ooops, foreign card, hang on again. Then finally, numbers in hand, she rummaged around in a drawer for the card imprinter and the little receipts to put in it and took the two card impressions and had me sign them both and after more than an hour we were on our way. An hour to pay by credit and debit, gotta be a record.

Even funnier was that it took about twelve days for the transactions to hit the bank. Sometimes we have to really wonder at that “newly industrialized country” status. Sometimes it seems pretty third world still. But we are thankful that there was someone here to fix it, the parts were available, that we had the money to pay most of it and that it is running fine. Praise the Lord and thanks for your prayers.