My coach Arturo (to my right) had been invited to speak at a road race in Chihuahua, Mexico, and he was driving down with his friend Gennaro (standing, to my left). I was interested in furnishing my apartment with inexpensive Rustico style furniture, and Arturo brought me along. We spent one night in Jaurez, just across the border from El Paso after a 10 hour drive in our rental truck. There we temporarily traded our truck for Arturo's friend Angel's Mexican-registered old beat-up pickup because one cannot take an American rental car any further than the border towns. Apparently cars cost more in Mexico than in America due to government taxes, and the Federales will not let you bring an American car south as they think you are trying to avoid the tax and sell it in Mexico. Crazy. Anyway, we drove our crappy pickup the further 4 hours to Chihuahua, where we stayed with Gennaro's family. I spent several hours haggling with several furniture store owners, and finally for less than $1000, I had purchased an entire apartments worth of bookshelves, nightstands, armoirs, and cabinets.The next day we ran a 10k race, and I really sucked. I was tired from the travel, and felt crummy from drinking only Fanta, as I did not trust any Mexican water. I finished a distant 4th, but still won a hundred bucks. Arturo almost caught me!
Afterwards we started the drive back to Jaurez with the creaking old truck loaded with a ton of furniture. It soon died. We sat in the dark on the side of a Mexican highway. Finally someone stopped an offered us a ride in the back of his chicken truck. Arturo stayed with our truck, because if we abandoned it, there would be nothing left but a stripped shell by the time we returned. I think he had a machete under the seat. Gennaro and I hopped in the strangers truck. Somehow we convinced someone to tow it to a locked storage lot owned by a friend of Arturo (Arturo has friends everywhere in Mexico as I would come to find out). We unloaded our precious cargo, and left the truck there, dead. We boarded a bus to Jaurez. I slept the whole bus ride, but Arturo later told me that some M-16 toting Federales came on board the bus at one point to search for illegal aliens. Yes, believe it or not, Mexico has problems with illegal aliens too. Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans are always trying to sneak into Mexico to steal away high paying jobs from Mexican citizens. I guess they took one look at me and decided I probably was not from Central America.
Sometime around dawn we arrived in Juarez. Arturo explained to Angel that his pickup was dead and still in Chihuahua. As I do not understand Spanish, I'm not sure exactly how that conversation went, but it sounded like "Hey bud, your truck is a piece of crap, it died on us, we left it behind, thanks, see ya!". And then, we were off to Colorado in our shiny new rental truck, sans furniture.
It was several months before Arturo and I got back to Chihuahua, and found all our furniture fully intact, though set up in someones house and very much in use. I sensed some resentment from the poor fellow's wife as we unloaded her stuff from my chest and bookshelf, and carried away all of their (borrowed) furnishings. Surely after a couple months they must have thought "Ah, the gringo is never coming back for his stuff." I was sorry to disappoint them.
