Pickup truck, fully loaded

The banana-loaded pickup

Sorting through my mountains of photos that some day I want to show you, I noticed a theme. Fully loaded pickup trucks.

People-loaded pickups
Riding in the back of a pickup truck is against the law in Honduras.

The mango-loaded pickup

The tire-loaded pickup − there really is a pickup under there.

The Beverly Hillbillies loaded pickup

This one is us! All I could think of while this truck was being loaded was the theme song from Beverly Hillbillies:

"They loaded up their truck and they moved to Beverly....
Hills, that is."

I had fun explaining to El Jefe the story of Jed and his hillbilly family striking oil, becoming millionaires, and loading up all their stuff in a truck to move to their new mansion. Didn't Granny sit on her rocker in the back of the truck?

We borrowed a pickup to bring back some furniture that we bought in San Pedro. It's a long story, but part of the furniture was delivered free and we assumed that the rest would be, too. When it finally came in, we were informed that it would cost L.3,500 to deliver it. "No way!" "Way," said the saleswoman over the phone. "Well, if you had waited to have it all delivered at once, it would have been free." El Jefe, looking at our previous furniture delivery, still unused and wrapped in plastic, said, "Well, if you had TOLD us that, we would have waited!"

We had already made an arrangement with the delivery service who the store used: when the furniture (2 chairs and an ottoman) were ready, we were going to pay him L.500 to go to another store to pick up the armoire and bring it all together. Ya just gotta know that when you figure out something clever, cheap, and efficient, it just ain't gonna work out that way in Honduras.

We picked up the chairs first. They almost filled the bed of the pickup themselves. When we went to the other store and saw the two HUGE boxes that the armoire was in, I thought no way in the world was all that stuff gonna fit in that little pickup.

But when there is a will, there is a way. And no way was El Jefe going to make two trips to San Pedro for that stuff. I walked around, chatted with the saleswoman, took a walk down the street, all the while trying not to think about it and trying not to imagine our new furniture bouncing along the highway as it fell out of the truck. An hour later, there we were: Everything loaded snug as a bug and tied down sufficiently to withstand a hurricane. No problemo.

You’re all invited back again to this locality
To have a heapin' helpin' of my hospitality

Hillbilly that is.
Set a spell.
Take your shoes off.
Y'all come back now, y'hear?