Traveling pregnant - Part I: Car problems

This is the first of a series of postings where I recount the experiences I had while visiting in Puerto Rico when I was pregnant with my first child. You may be tempted to think I exaggerate or that I’m making these things up. Unfortunately, they are all true. It was one of those trips…

When we headed to PR that year, 2008, we were very excited for all the plans we had and things we were going to do. We may have avoided a lot of mayhem by renting a car, but it wasn’t in our budget. I was about 6 months pregnant. It all started when the pickup truck a family member was letting us borrow, did not have the “marbete.” That meant we could not drive it, until the vehicle passed inspection and we paid the fees for what is similar to the vehicle’s registration process here in the US. Well, turns out someone with an inspection facility (something like the emissions test), who was a friend of a friend, agreed to do the inspection of the car without actually seeing the pickup truck, which hadn’t been used in about a year (I was not happy about this idea).

When we got to the shop, mind you it was not in the same town we were staying at, the guy could not do the inspection because he was not authorized to inspect—with or without the car—diesel vehicles. But, he did know someone, in another town, who could help us out. Did I mention this was all on a Friday, near Christmas, when most people are ready to start celebrating and leave work early? No? Well, keep that in mind for later…

We did find the guy, but he was busy until later in the afternoon, which was ok, because we had just discovered that the vehicle was still in my husband’s name (it was his pickup when we lived there). We had made arrangements the previous year to change this, but it never got done…

That meant we had to find an attorney that would be able to sign an affidavit (the title of the vehicle got lost and we needed a new one), so we could transfer the vehicle to its new owner before we got the marbete. We went to another town and found possibly the last attorney at work, who was literally sleeping in his office with the flu. His secretary typed the whole document with one finger and no hurry whatsoever. I remember because I was desperately needing to go to the bathroom (pregnancy will do that to you) and I could not use theirs because the sleeping attorney was taking a nap and the bathroom was in his chambers.

Finally, at about 4pm, we had all the paper work necessary and were able to get the inspection, title, and make the change of ownership before they closed the office that day. We drove back and forth between four towns to get this done and never even saw the pickup! In the end, they loaned us another car. So, at almost 6 or 7 pm, we were getting ready to head to Mayaguez, where my family had been waiting for us all day. Turns out the car we got, had balled tires!! At that time there was nothing we could do, so we decided to drive slowly and carefully. Traffic helped with the “slowly” part. Twenty minutes into the two-hour drive, we ran into stopped traffic: a car had burned up along the side of the road. Yup, and guess what? We weren’t going anywhere fast and I had to go to the bathroom again. We made it to Mayaguez at about 10 p.m. We were supposed to have been there at about lunch time. And I have spared all the minor details that made the day even more exasperating, like long lines in Hacienda and asking for directions at a gas station and getting lost, traffic everywhere and finding a parking space in town and then walking several blocks to get to the office...

All of this was after I had already had the worst ever government-office experience the day before. That is the story of the next post…