Trying to Find a Windshield Pt. 2

You can click HERE to catch up on part 1. What do you know, the next morning (a Saturday with plans to drive with the family to Guate on Sunday), I called and "fijese" the windshield didn't come. I expected this, so I told them to have my deposit ready and that I was going to come and pick up the Micro and take it to somebody who could do it right.

I then set about trying to find a windshield in Petén. A friend of mine called four different places in Santa Elena that he knew about and nobody had one for our model of Micro (there are TONS of these things on the roads, so I'm not sure how that's possible), but he was going to keep looking. I drove my truck to the city, thinking I could take the Micro to a windshield place and drive home without having to spend another day sitting around. My friend called back after about 30 minutes and told me that he found one in Melchor. Melchor is a border town with Belize and takes anywhere from 1.5-2 hours to get to from Santa Elena. The problem was that there was no box to ship it in, and therefore no way to get it to Santa Elena.

When I told him that I would just drive the Micro there with no windshield he acted like I was the dumbest Gringo he'd ever met. Anyways, he set it up with a friend of his there who could install the windshield and I went and got a pair of sunglasses, picked up the Micro and my deposit, and started driving. I will add that I was nice to the ladies at the Serviteca, because I didn't know what parts of my Micro they still had and I didn't want to burn any bridges and lose parts forever.

You don't fully appreciate a windshield until it's gone... Bugs at 60 miles an hour feel like rocks, and rocks...make you bleed. I think everybody should see Guatemala in this way at least once though. You can hear the people laughing at you; you can smell the horse drawn carts and the soap from the laundry day in the river; you can taste the gravel from the rustic dirt roads... I guess it would be like driving a big not-fun motorcycle.

Side note: my first dicho (axiom) that I learned in Spanish was "En boca cerrada no entran moscas." It means, "Flies don't enter a closed mouth." and it was sage advice for this experience.

So after 2 hours I made it, found my new windshield and the whole installation process was pretty painless. A couple hours later, we discovered the Serviteca still had one of the bars to my grill guard (that they had to remove for some reason before installing the windshield) and my rear-view mirror. Told you so!

The drive back was much more pleasant.

It was when I picked those items up that I informed them I would no longer be spending money at their business.