With all the excitement and, dare I say frustration, of
yesterday’s post about my parking lot saga, I completely skipped over posting
about renewing my carnet on Monday. So
here goes…
Sandi and I had planned to leave Comayagua around 7:00 am,
and we weren’t too far off from that. I
think it was right around 7:15 when we pulled out. Our first stop was to get some gas. Then we were off, dodging potholes - some as
large as small farm ponds - and zigging and zagging through construction, until
we got to Flores. At Flores, the potholes were mostly gone and it was just a
matter of dealing with the road construction.
We made it to Migraciones around 9:30 or so. I got in a line that looked promising, handed
the woman my folder of stuff and was quickly given a paper to take to the bank
to pay. After paying, I was back at the
first window, where I was told I was ready to go and just needed to have a seat
and wait for one of the other windows to be available. So, Sandi & I sat.
A few minutes later, I started to feel a bit uneasy, as if
we were waiting for nothing, so I got up and went to one of the windows that I
was supposed to be waiting for – the line was long and all the chairs
filled. I just kind of stood there until
the young man at the window left. Then I
skipped the line to ask the woman a “quick question”.
I’m glad I did that, because it turned out that I was
missing one paper that was needed for my renewal. We called Erica, back at Enlaces, and
explained what we needed. Erica would email me the letter I was missing. Then, we drove
over to the mall to go to the internet café.
Ha! The internet café
in Mall Multiplaza is gone!! Calling
Trifi, we found out there’s an internet café in Plaza Miraflores. That was on our way back to Migraciones,
which was a good thing. I checked my
email, printed out the letter I needed and paid less than $ 1.00 for all
that. We were soon back at Migraciones.
By then, the long line was down to just two people in front
of me, but it was quickly approaching 12 noon.
Pretty much everything at Migraciones stops for lunch at noon. Sandi and I were both praying we’d be done
and not have to come back after lunch.
Cutting to the chase, we were. By
12:05pm I had my new carnet in my hand.
I’m legal for another year!!
Next stop:
shopping!! With Thanksgiving and
Christmas right around the corner, there are lots of things we need. Our first store was Stock. Stock is kind of an overstock price
club. We both found a few things there,
and then got back in the car to head to PriceSmart (think Costco or Sam’s
Club).
Right behind PriceSmart, we saw a brand new Stock, so of
course we needed to check it out.
Wow!! It was awesome, like being
a kid in a candy store. I’m hoping that
they end up keeping both stores open since they have different things in each
store. Finally, we made our way over to
PriceSmart.
It was a bit disappointing that PriceSmart didn’t have more
things that we needed. No turkeys at
all! And they’re not planning to get
any. They were also out of other things
we normally buy. Oh, well. The trip
wasn’t a total waste: I splurged and
bought a big bag of Christmas M&M’s.
We had wanted to leave Tegucigalpa by about 3:00pm so that
we’d be home before or right at dark. It
was 4:00pm when we left, so we weren’t too far off schedule, but we knew we’d be
doing the final pothole-laden section of road in the dark. As it turned out, we didn’t get home until
7:00pm – even though it’s only a 1 ½ hour drive, but I’ll leave that for
another post.
Despite car troubles, it was a good day: I’m a legal resident of Honduras for another
year!!
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