The little diesel that could..our new truck

We bought and actually received our truck. Whooohooo. We shopped for the truck a week ago Monday. It took ALL DAY in Panama City. Have I mentioned yet how much I do NOT like PC. We got out of there without getting in a horrific accident. We should get a medal for that. We wired money on Tuesday. It came right out of our acct. however took a bit of time to show up here in Panama but it did arrive FOR THE WRONG FRIGGIN AMOUNT. Thank you very much TD Bank. It actually was our banks fault but we didn’t find this out until we were half way to PC on Saturday to pick up the truck. Our phone rings, it’s the salesman and he says, you owe another $1,000. Well we’ve heard how you can buy something here then show up to pick it up and the price goes up. My legs started shaking. OH NO please don’t do this to us. After a few calls back and forth we do find out in fact TD wired less money than we requested. By the time we drove to PC, returned our rental car, made the payment we owed and waited for the truck to show up, it was a full day. Literally about 8 hours….and the truck still showed up without the trailer hitch or bed cover installed. That’s ok, they were in boxes and it gave Wayne something to do for the next day. We narrowly avoided several good crashes on our way out of PC in our shiny new truck! I was so happy to pull into the driveway with all of the truck intact as well as ourselves. Oh and here’s a good one, we didn’t get a license plate. Just a paper one to keep in the vehicle. Why? Because they ran out of the metal they use to make plates. That just cracked us up.

Some facts on buying a vehicle if you are only a tourist....have a drivers license, passport and a way to get money to the dealer. Also, you need to get insurance but the dealer and the insurance co. can speak directly to each other and get everything done for you. You can pay for the insurance with a credit card and it's about half of what it costs in the US.

The downside to buying a new vehicle is Wayne’s mental illness has gotten drastically worse. When he owned his Silverado, he felt a special connection to every other stranger that owned one. He’d point out every single one of them on the road at the same time as us. Well now of course the connection has been made to all Hilux’s, in addition to Silverado’s of course. That’s ok, but it’s progressed now to pointing out Chevy Caravans, Mercury Capris and Datsuns. Well, maybe the Datsun was worth a glace. Not sure if there’s a treatment for this disease. I’ll have to check out WebMD.