(What do you do when you finally get your license plates? Of course! You jump out at the first red light, engine running, driver door open, and pose for a quick pic! Actually, I was just trying to relay a message to my traveling partner who took the pic, but it was a good photo op too!)
Placas are license plates. After applying for the Mexico plates for our van on January 14th and being repeatedly told to “check back next week,” this was finally THE week!
And as with the entire process, nothing came easy today. My teammate, Brock, and I arrived to the office early and upon seeing we were the only ones there, had high hopes of getting through the process quickly.
Hahahaha…why would we have thought that?!?
Well, without even really looking up our paperwork the official that began to work with us said, “You’ll need to come back in 10 working days.” The lady working next to her, and apparently the office boss, probably recognized us and said, “No, I think they’re ready.” Yeah…well…since they told us they were ready, I would think so. Thankfully, the information was checked and sure enough, our plates were approved.
However, there was a small matter of a paper we needed that we didn’t know about and since the issue of changing the official ownership from Brock back to me hadn’t yet come up, we hadn’t mentioned it yet and they hadn’t mentioned the need for another paper…easy to get…but we’d need to have two witnesses sign it with copies of their voting cards too. Oh boy…finding two people with voting cards wouldn’t seem like a difficult thing but at 8:30 a.m. on a working day, it could be a challenge. So, off we went in search of the form to purchase and the two voters to sign.
The Lord is good as always and while we did have to drive around town a bit, by a little before 11 a.m. we were back with paper in-hand. By noon, we were driving to the emissions testing location for the next to last hoop we needed to get through. The van failed.
Well, it turns out that the van having sat for over a month was not running quite up to top performance and barely failed the test. The tester said to get a tune-up…change the plugs…that would be the thing to do to get it to pass. Interestingly, I had purchased the spark plugs and an air surge gasket in Dallas the night before we left for the border because at 90K miles, I figured we were getting to that point. The only reason the tune-up hadn’t been done yet was because we were waiting to get through the process to get the plates so we could be free to drive and get that done. If it weren’t for the slow process, the van would probably have passed, but oh well, we were going to get the tune-up anyway. I have 30 days to get the car re-inspected. We’re allowed to drive it during this month.
Except, we’re not really able to drive it just yet because the final hoop is to purchase insurance, especially liability insurance. The agent was a little slow in getting back to us and now we’re in the middle of trying to find a good price point based on the market value of the van which no one seems to know. We’re supposed to know this I guess. We were given a very reasonable quote before the value of the van was asked for and after exchanging emails and giving a potentially generous value, the price of the insurance quote went up 300%. So, we hope to try again tomorrow with a lower stated value. We’re pretty much going with that at this point because we don’t really have much choice. Hopefully, we’ll see a significant drop in the price too.
Thanks for praying over this situation. It’s been a two month trial, but we’re so glad that we’re seeing the other side of it!
Knowing Your ABCDs 