Progress!

Man, we've had a lot of bad luck lately. First my laptop breaks, then my Amazon account gets closed, then Igor breaks down. It helps that we are pretty good at rolling with the punches!

By the same token, we've got a lot of great things on the go as well. Number one is that we're in Mexico!

And yesterday we made some progress on some of the bad luck items.

We woke up after having slept at the side of the road Monday night. We actually slept quite well other than the Jake brake noise from the occasional heavy truck going by. No big deal. We got moving right at sunrise and drove down to the intersection where there is a Pemex gas station and an OXXO store.

On the road at 7:00am.

We sat at the Pemex for an hour and had a hot drink. While we were sitting there, a guy was doing a milk delivery at the store. He works for the Lala dairy. He came over to take a photo of Igor. I opened the door to say hello, and explained that we were having some mechanical problems. He got right on the phone to try and find us a local mechanic, but didn't have any luck. Nice guy, with a big smile!

Then we headed into Galeana.

Entrance to the town of Galeana.

Igor had no problem doing the 8km (5 mile) detour into the town of Galeana (pop 40,000). We found a parking spot and set out to find a mechanic. 

Galeana is not a tourist town. Because it's not on any route heading south, RV'ers have no reason to come here. So we kind of stand out like a sore thumb. Everyone is very friendly though.

We came up to an intersection where there was a transito police (municipal traffic cop) and asked him where there was a mechanic.

He gave us some directions and we walked down a side street.

Yep, this looks like a mechanic shop. But there was nobody around.

Old Chevy. Maybe 1960 or 1961?

We found an auto parts place very close to the central plaza. Right next door, there was a small mechanic shop. I went and talked to the guy, and he speaks quite good English, having spent some time in the U.S. when he was younger. Nice guy, and after I explained the problem he said we could bring Igor right up.

We dropped him off, and went for a walk to the plaza.

The central plaza.

Ruth at the Galeana sign in the plaza.

I had noticed that there is a Coppel store here in town. They had a laptop we were looking at when Chris and Juan took us shopping last week, but I couldn't get our credit card to work in the store. This time, they had the same laptop and the same sale price of 9,500 pesos tax included. ($655 CAD, $469 USD) with intel i5 processor, 16GG ram, and 512GB storage. Good deal.

But my credit card wouldn't work again. We decided to go have some lunch while figuring out if we wanted to just bite the bullet and pay cash. We get a lot of credit card points, so we would lose out on that. But, I need a laptop!

This looks like a good spot for lunch!

The lady was really nice, and cooked us up some gorditas.

We decided to buy the laptop. There was only one Banorte ATM in town, and it had no problem spitting out 10,000 pesos for us in one shot. Normally the limits are much lower.

Spent the rest of the afternoon getting the laptop setup. I also called Amazon once again, trying to get my account re-instated. They're morons. They say they want to help, but they have no way to allow me to talk to anybody on "the team" who is supposed to be the ones helping. They promise to contact me within 24 hours, but they never do. It's absolutely amazing how they can treat a loyal customer of ten years like this. Let alone the fact that I send them over a million dollars worth of business every year, which they risk losing. I know, I am just a drop in the bucket (or maybe ocean?) to them. I'm not confident that it will ever be reinstated.

Ruth spotted this really pretty moth on the walk back to the garage.

We wish we could have seen it with the wings open.

Igor being worked on.

The place is really messy. i don't know how they can work like that, but so long as they get the job done, it doesn't matter. You can see at the side of Igor where they have the jugs of gasoline that they removed from the tank. It's unfortunate that I had only filled up in Linares, so they had to remove well more than 100 liters (26 gallons) of fuel.

While we were there, there is a horn honking on the street, and it turns out it's the Lala milk delivery guy from earlier on. Too funny that he drove by and could see us parked here from the road!

They finally got the tank out.

The guy has a well organized tool box!

Unfortunately, they couldn't find the right fuel pump here in town. You can buy it as an assembly, or in pieces, and he could only find one of the pieces, so he had to drive an hour back to Linares to get the parts. He still couldn't buy the assembly, but he says he now has all the parts to put it together. Fingers crossed.

We still haven't filled the fridge, and just decided to go out for dinner. Yet again! We sure have been missing Mexican food!

We even splurged on a couple of margaritas at 70 pesos ($4.85 CAD, $3.45 USD) each!

Fajitas for dinner, at 180 pesos ($12.50 CAD, $8.90 USD).

Ruth had a different type of fajitas, but it was more like a chicken salad.

We slept fine in the mechanic shop, and the guys are already out there working on Igor. He said he was confident they will finish up today. We are going to walk over to the laguna.