Last Saturday I was making my way back from Cuauhtemoc, Mexico to Ciudad Juarez with my Grandma in her 2001 PT Cruiser. The skies were clear and the highway was relatively empty as we pulled into Villa Ahumada, a small town just an hour south of Ciudad Juarez.
I was hungry but as we were so close to our destination it just didn’t seem prudent to stop, despite the fact that the burritos there are to die for. With that in mind we made haste. Screeech, Crash. Steam ………
It was about that quick that a red Ford pickup stopped dead on the highway in front of me and while I had enough time to do a shoulder check, it quickly revealed that to my right was a tractor trailer rig and to my left was oncoming traffic.
The reality of what had happened we soon found out was that a Green Ford Explorer had all of a sudden decided it was going the wrong way and wanted to do a u-turn in the highway, the red Ford ahead me quickly picked up on this despite the desperate lack of warning he received and was able to make the stop. We on the other were at quite a disadvantage because the brake lights on the Ford in front of us were not functioning, and I had only a quickly vanishing stretch of pavement by which to determine that we were going to impact.
So what happened to the green Ford Explorer was nothing, that lady was able to do her u-turn in peace. All the red Ford pickup experienced was a slightly shifted bumper and a less than pleasant impact from behind. The PT Cruiser got the worst of it as you might imagine and experienced a broken Radiator and some bent quarter panels miraculously, however, the front grill is still in perfect shape.
So, at this point I was now left with the greater challenge of getting us and the broken car to Ciudad Juarez in some manner or other. Fortunately for us, the lady in the green Ford had actually stopped to see what had happened while she obliviously stopped on the highway and once I spoke with her she claimed that her husband owned a fleet of tow trucks and that she knew some mechanics in the town and proceeded to offer me a ride to one. I was quick to accept.
The garage that she brought me to was everything I dreamed it might be. Deplorable to the average North American. Never the less, I didn’t lose heart and the mechanic proved to be a friendly, older gentlemen that was quick to offer his sevices. So I hopped into his truck and went back to the scene of the incident with him.
It didn’t take him to concur with my diagnosis and gave us some options:
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I could go with him to Ciudad Juarez to pick up a radiator, come back, and he would install it there and we could drive ourselves back later that day.
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We could get the car hauled to a garage in Ciudad Juarez and have it fixed there.
We chose the latter. So I drove the car 100 meters up the highway to a road side tire shop where we waited for an hour for someone to show up with one of those two wheeled vehicle hauling trailers, put the car on it’s new wheels and rode an hour and a half up the highway in the least air conditioned, most farmer style, single cabbed pick-up in Mexico.
We got to Ciudad Juraez, dropped the car off at my Grandma’s house and paid the man $150 for his services. End of Story and when all was said and done we got to our destination a mere 3 hours late, which really is beginning to seem quite normal for Mexico.
