Saved by the Nacion

Saved by the Nacion. I knew I had the national paper in my car for something! I went to a park off the beaten track today to see birds and hopefully alligators! Palo Verde is twenty eight kilometers down a beaten road that made you wish you never started but frankly I kept driving because I wanted to take a boat ride and see the alligators and birds. When I got there I turned off the car and went inside to pay the guy. Unfortunately, I found out that because of the dry season there was no water to take a boat on! When I turned my car back on five minutes later all I heard was the sickening click, click, click of the battery. Then I did not even hear that! What was I going to do? It was about noon, the temperature was about 40 degrees and the money collector did not even have a car, let alone cables. I asked him when the next car might show up and he just shrugged his shoulders as if to say, maybe a few days!!!

Thankfully it was Saturday and I had the Nacion, the national newspaper of Costa Rica and lucky for me it was the Saturday edition which is huge with all of the advertisements and so on. I opened the hood, pried off the clamps from the battery and used the Nacion to clean the clamps with a little water supplied by the guy. I saw that battery was obviously leaking so I wanted to make sure all of the connections were clean. After working on the car for about 30 minutes I finally got it started… or was that a mirage brought on by the waves of heat?

What actually happened was that by some miracle some reporters from the Nacion came by ( I knew the newspaper played a role here and they even had cables, some beautiful tools and off to work they went. Somehow, a mechanic even showed up as they were working, believe it or not, and they finally got the car started.

Rather than go into the park, I travelled back to Liberia and went to the nearest gasoline station, in fact the only gasoline station, to turn off the car to see if it would start again. The good news is that it did start and I give credit to where credit is due…The Nction. The bad news is that I had a flat tire! I just happened to be parked in front of the tire guy who kind of mentioned I should look at the tire which just happened to be flat).

What is absolutely amazing is that the Rosetta Stone program I am working on just happened to be on flat tires this week so I was fabulous. I could negotiate with him to fix the tire, sell me a second hand tire and look at the battery ( discargado) but guess what, he did not have a second hand tire so I am left with my bald tire. I may even go new this week but not sure how to say this since it was not in the program.