Happy 200th!

This is our 200th post since we started this blog roughly a year ago. Thanks to everyone for keeping up with us this way. We've really enjoyed it so far and hope to continue to use this forum to communicate with our friends and family over the next year.

We had clinic this morning in Chicabracan. At about 11:30, Matt, Tammy, and Steve left and Heidi and Justin finished up the last couple patients. Nothing extraordinary, but some nice time with several of our regular patients.

Matt took Tammy and Steve down to Guatemala City. Tammy is flying out tomorrow and Steve was riding along. Matt took the opportunity to get the alignment on the truck fixed.

They stopped at the Goodyear place (yes, we have one of those here) on the way into town and Tammy and Steve took a cab to the airport while Matt was waiting. The plan was for Matt and Steve to meet up later and go back to Quiche.

Matt left the Goodyear place and was about a mile down the road when the truck quit and started smoking. He coasted into the parking lot at Tikal Futura, the big mall in the City. The goal was to get somewhere where he was enough in the way where people would feel obligated to help him to get him out of their way. God provided sufficient inertia to make that work. Matt made it all the way to the gate of the parking lot before the truck stopped.

The security guards were very nice and helpful. They called their boss to come out, helped push the truck out of the way of incoming traffic, and let Matt call Heidi on their cell phone (to alert Steve to come back from the airport to the mall by cab). The security boss's brother-in-law is a mechanic, who came out and replaced the starter on the truck. Something went wrong with the key. When Matt started the truck and let go of the key, it didn't rotate back to the "on" position and instead stayed in the "start" position, thus burning up the starter. Total cost: about an hour and a half and Q850 (about $120).

So, about 9:30pm, Matt and Steve rolled back into Quiche. We now have a new definition for "long day".

Tomorrow is a day of rest before we head off into the jungle. No alarms tomorrow morning! We do have several errands to run, but it should be a relatively low key day.