September. I have no idea whatever happened to August or the summer, but I suppose this blog will help me figure it out. All I know is that within the space of time it takes this beautiful troubled sphere in space to do a half rotation, we’ll have begun a journey that will take us to its other side.

Just a couple of weeks ago we were making our way into San Pedro to do what we had told ourselves all summer long was the unthinkable. In the absence of any solid or decent offers on our amazing life support capsule (the Jimmy) we had resigned ourselves to sell it at a car lot in San Pedro. While not optimal, those guys have the cash on hand and there would be little games involved.

Or so we thought. It would seem GM suffers from quite a substantial image problem in Latin America. While I’d be the last guy to feel pity for the woes of a multinational colossus, the repercussions of their poor quality control and dismal brand management were having a direct impact in our lives. In short, we gambled by pressing on with our “sell at all cost” policy which resulted in roughly four days of intense negotiations that eventually collapsed on our last Friday in Honduras before our flight to the US.

At one point during our high-level talks we were recommended that we should visit someplace known simply as “the hot corner”. This turned out to be not one corner, but instead an area of about three or four blocks in downtown San Pedro where people with lots of cash on hand and others in need of cash congregate and transact in vehicles of uncertain origin. That an informal marketplace of no-questions-asked vehicular transactions has sprouted in that town should have been of no surprise. Still, it was amusing driving around talking to dubious, if not outright shady, characters known only by their colorful nicknames.

In the end we decided to ship the Jimmy to Miami and just sell it online. This turned out to be much cheaper than paying the import duties and leaving it for sale in Honduras. Also, there was a somewhat circular poetry to this option that made for a fitting end to this journey. The only problem was that in order to ship it, I needed about two days of bureaucratic gymnastics in several government agencies to jump through the necessary hoops.

That’s exactly what we did. I managed to get a flight using frequent flyer miles to return to Honduras 6 days after what was supposed to be the end of our time there. An epilog of sorts, as it were. In the space of a dizzying week and a half I managed to return to the US, fly to Dallas for naturalization, get a US passport (in one day), get a Florida driver’s license, fly to Honduras and ship the car, and I may just be able to register to vote before leaving! While frenzied and rather anxiety-ridden, those few days in Honduras were the last of this episode in our lives and I feel compelled to do them justice with at least a few words here.

The trip began (in what I silently hoped was not to be a bad omen) with a typical late summer afternoon thunderstorm hanging over MIA that was directly responsible for our flight taking off over an hour late. The trip went on without incident though, and I was fortunately able to get myself to La Ceiba that same night and avoid spending any more time than I had to in San Pedro. I spent the following 36 reflective and somewhat melancholy hours in La Ceiba bidding her a proper farewell. As if to have divined my mood, Ceibita was generous enough to reward us with a Sunday of stunning beauty. After running a few errands and visiting family that morning, I spent a couple of hours sitting at the bar at ExPat’s sipping on some ice cold Salva Vidas and writing in the blog. From time to time though, I had to stop to soak up the stiff breeze that swept through the open air, rooftop bar. Later, after several bar conversations and sensation of levity had taken over me, I lazed away the rest of the afternoon reading on the back yard hammock. Again, with the requisite pauses to become lucidly aware of the intensely intoxicating nature of beautiful Sunday afternoon.

The next morning I was in and out of San Pedro in less than two hours and drove to Puerto Cortes, Honduras’ and Central America’s main port for container cargo. There I managed to get all my paperwork from the customs broker before lunchtime and had only one thing left to do. Things were looking great and I started to think about checking for late afternoon or early evening flights back to MIA.

Well, sometime shortly after 1, my enthusiasm ran into the reality of hard-core red tape and old school bureaucracy. The customs office in Puerto Cortes is housed in a long narrow room in a two story concrete building just outside one of the main entrances to the docks. The hot stagnant air was accompanied by lots of small wooden desks piled high with forms that to my dismay looked identical to the ones I needed to file. There were a couple of pedestal type standing fans that were making a valiant, albeit futile, effort to struggle against the heat that by that time was determined to make a merciless assault deep into the office.

Despite the rich visual texture in this monument to all that is third world in a third world country, what really made it a site worthy of serious scientific study were its people. Out of the 20 or so employees, there were about four that were actually working. Most were hanging out killing time, chit-chatting about the weekend, and flirting in ways that would surely yield a lucrative lawsuit in the US. Then there were all the customs brokers. These were men and women wearing bright orange vests and hard hats as they constantly run between the port, the customs office, the shippers’ offices, and their own. The combination of their physical stamina to run up and down the hot Puerto Cortes streets and their patience in dealing with the government workers is remarkable.

I don’t think you have to be a clairvoyant to figure out that the process might take a little more than a couple of hours. Indeed, it was about four hours later that I managed to get all my papers filed and the car delivered to the port. I have to admit that I was a bit uneasy about all the dockworkers from the shipping company that received the vehicle checking it out and commenting how nice it was. I can imagine them taking turns doing donuts and racing around the cranes and stacks of containers for kicks during breaks. In any case, I was done. The only thing I needed was to get a stamp on my passport saying the vehicle I entered the country with would be leaving it. As simple as this might seem, the lady who needed to sign and stamp my forms authorizing the passport stamp refused to do it because it was too late. When I showed up again the next morning at 8 as she told me, she wasn’t there! In fact it took us an hour just to convince her assistant to look in her desk for the forms. Increadible! Anyway, I finaly got everything done and managed to take a bus to San Pedro so I could go to the airport and try to get on standby for the next fight out. It was an exhausting marathon of a week, but it was done. I should point out here that an important lesson we learned is that the more stuff you own, the more the stuff owns you.

Anyway, here we are, just a few hours before taking off for the continent and an official end to this chapter in our lives. Whenever making major changes in life, I find it ill-fitting to do so abruptly. While there needs to be a decisive and clean break from one era to another, there should nonetheless be a seamless transition to acclimate to changing realities. That this transition takes place over four months and half the hemisphere is insignificant as long as it is complete and irreversible. I was about to write that from now on, everything would be completely new and unknown territory. However, isn’t that what everyday essentially is? One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from our travels, especially in talking to people who were traveling or had made what many might consider drastic life changes, is the degree to which we have flexibility of choice in how we live our lives. There are always options, not always ideal, but they are there regardless. That’s the funny thing with freedom, if you think you have it then you have an obligation to actively exercise it.