Oh Yeah, What Happened With the Car?

So I guess I never really explained why I got an "I told you so" about Cindy shipping her car. To recap, Cindy felt very strongly that she should ship her car here to Puerto Rico, I felt she should not. Cindy really shopped around and found a company, Total Car Shipping that quoted a price that was about $1,000 less than anyone else. They are a broker that uses a number of shipping companies to get the car to Puerto Rico. The company that would ship the car from Florida to Puerto Rico was Rosa Del Monte. A representative of Rosa Del Monte suggested that it would take about one week to get the car to Orlando, Florida and then 10-15 days to Puerto Rico from there, so Cindy planned on shipping the car one month before we left, allowing they would let the car be stored for one week free of charge if it got there before we did.

As the date of our departure grew close, Cindy stayed in contact with the shipping companies and another company that was shipping the car from LA to Orlando told her that it would probably take a lot longer to get the car to its destination, so Cindy asked to have the car picked up about 5 days earlier than originally planned, that was a good idea.

After we arrived on August 1st, Cindy started looking into when her car would arrive. We knew it hadn't gotten there yet, but were renting a car and that cost would add up quickly. After one week, Cindy's father and stepmother, Ed and Heidi, came to help with the move and we were able to turn the rental car in, but still no word on when the car would arrive.

Finally a few days before Ed and Heidi were to leave we got word that the car would arrive on Saturday, August 15th, a full 3 weeks after the original date we were told. But that's not the worst part. Along with the cost of shipping the car, Puerto Rico imposes taxes on any car brought in. Both Total Car Shipping and Rosa Del Monte quoted Cyndi a cost of around $800 in taxes. When we got to the Departmento de Hacienda, where the taxes were to be paid, we were told it would cost $2,114 in taxes! Apparently the government of Puerto Rico uses the mysterious "Black Book' to calculate a vehicle's worth and in this "Black Book" Cindy's 1996 BMW 328i convertible with 150,000 miles and a Blue Book value of $6000 was worth $14,000.

Knowing full well a fight was useless, and desperately needing our car, we paid the taxes and picked up the car. We were told the battery needed to be charged, but at Rosa Del Monte, they started the car for us and off we went.

Overall, having a reliable car in an unreliable environment is all well and good, but nowhere near worth the stress and unpredictability of having to ship it. The road from San Juan to Rincon is lined with all sorts of car dealers, to me it seems there are far too many cars on the island, surely they aren't all lemons. We felt very fortunate that the car wasn't damaged or worse and the first few days of driving in Rincon in our car was nice, but we soon came to the realization that a convertible BMW wasn't exactly an ideal car in Rincon and we staring thinking about finding a way to trade it for a Jeep.

I had a specific Jeep in mind. It was a red Wrangler I had seen parked at a local hardware store with a Se Vende sign on its windshield. When we spoke to the owner, Jesus, he told us to come down, we could drive the jeep and he could see what we had. We knew right away that this was what we needed. In the 2 weeks we had the BMW, the interior had been thrashed from sand and sea water as well as the dogs and the hardware store loading up. Jesus called us later in the day to say he would be happy to trade the Jeep for the BMW and $2000. Unfortunately, we said, we didn't have any money, we needed to trade straight across.

3 days later Jesus called to say his daughter needed a car and he would accept an even trade. Somehow things had worked out again. Somehow Fate or Destiny or another of the mythological or metaphysical beings had descended upon us and bestowed its gift, and once agin we were thankful that the saga of the shipped car had a happy ending.