Truckin It!

Buenos Dias amigos y familia!
At five fifteen a.m. this morning, our alarm honked an absurd amount of beeps. Steve swatted at it, but it was relentless as it knew best. We arose from our slumber and threw our jeans, t-shirts on and we got out of the house by five thirty. Every morning, the big yellow public bus hauls itself over the hills, down the dirt dusty roads to the capital. We had never traveled out of Moroceli to the capital on a Sunday and mistakenly counted on the bus leaving regularly. The neighbor advised us that Sunday buses do not pass as frequently as during the week. So there we found ourselves, in the morning dawn wandering down the paved road. Not more than ten minutes later a roar of an engine gave us hope of finding a comfortable ride on the public bus. However, instead of the yellow bus, a large monster of a semi truck hulled itself over the hill. I stuck out my thumb, and at this gesture you must understand that it is not as dangerous here as in the United States to hitchhike. Here, hitchhiking is a common form of transportation because the majority of the population does not own their own automobile. In response to my gesture, the driver of the semi truck pulled took his time putting on the break. The semi lay waiting about twenty-feet ahead of us and we ran for our free ride in the high up cab.
You might think that here is the climax of my story. While it was exciting to ride the semi truck, our ride ended all too shortly at the intersection at the main road and we found ourselves waiting once again for a bus to pass. Those of you that know me well know that one of my greatest faults and beauties is my lack of patience. For this life is never boring since I go from one thing directly to the next. So as you can imagine, as Steve was ready to take a rest under the shade of a tree, I advanced walking not willing to waste a precious moment waiting. We walked up the hill still an immense distance from the capital. Each pick-up truck that passed, I tried the luck of my thumb, but the trucks roared past on the main road. Finally a loud chug, chug, chug, hummed in the distance and its song came closer and closer until we saw its beastly headlights and large white frame. Another semi. We joked about the inprobability of it stopping but we both tried the double luck of our thumbs. It roared past us and then the beast calmed down to a rest some forty feet in front of us and the drivers hand waved out the window, a friendly invitation. We ran with all our might and climbed onto the big jagged tires and crawled into the red capeted cab. My curiosity lead us into a conversation about where he was from, and respectively we shared our experiences with him. Our friendly driver carries cuban cigars all over central america. In his current trip, he had left his home country of Costa Rica the day before and was headed to the North Coast of Honduras. He has two children, he says, and enjoys his job of passing through and getting to know the Central American countries. And for sure we had one opinion in common-- Tegucigalpa is indeed the ugliest capital in all of the world. And in that horrible ugly, smelly, smogged city, he left us with a hand shake and a Que le vaya bien. It was a great adventure truckin it from our small pueblo of Moroceli to the big fat captial of Tegucigalpa.