This Car Is Definitely Not an Inside Car

Adventures with a questionably road-worthy vehicle in Mexico

Cute little car, right?

My sister and I rented this piece in Cozumel where we were vacationing last week with my youngest kiddo. Here’s how that transaction went down:

The Guy: We have a Nissan for you for $65 per day.

Me: Do you have anything left at the $45 price?

Him: Yes, but it is…not inside. It is…convertible?

Side Note: He searched for the English words because, despite having lived in Texas my whole life, I don’t speak any Spanish beyond Sesame Street level. Bad on me. I’m in his country.

I looked at my sister: You okay with a convertible?

Her: Hell, yeah!

And so we putted off down the narrow, shop-lined street, but not before I accidentally killed the engine right in front of the guy because I hadn’t driven a standard transmission in fifteen years.

I was nervous at first, but my muscle memory kicked in quickly, and my legs remembered how to work a clutch. The roads around the car rental place weren’t busy, so I had some room for error.

The car was loud and a little smelly, so perhaps it was a diesel engine, I thought. It was not; it just ran rough. Having the back part completely open was a definite plus, though, since the rearview mirror looked like this:

Another advantage: plastic seats because even with the top closed, it was nowhere near watertight. As the guy noted, being in this car, top up or down, was definitely not akin to being “inside.” The back got drenched in a few cursory downpours, but those seats dried right up once the sun came out. And the only partially inflated tires didn’t seem to be a problem on wet roads as long as we went sub-32 km per hour.

That first day…

I got us from the rental place to Chedraui, the grocery store we gringos could neither pronounce or remember the name of until we bought big, orange cloth grocery bags with the name on them. We loaded up on provisions and headed back to our Air BnB, only missed the turn onto the one-way road once, and parked the Chevy “not-inside” Whatever on the grass without incident.

We’d bought shrimp, veggies, pasta and pesto to cook that night for some friends who just happened to be vacationing in Cozumel at the same time — a slight variation on the dish trending in my limited cooking repertoire right now.

My only paid-for souvenir from this trip: a giant $1 Chedraui bag

Dinner went swimmingly.

My friend and her son came over, and the food was delicious. It’s amazing how much better shrimp tastes when it hasn’t been frozen and trucked across Texas for nine hours first. We had some wine, and they stayed until almost 11pm when it was time for me to fulfill my promise that I would drive them back to their hotel. Because while it was easy for them to get a taxi to our remote place from theirs in town, finding one back would have been challenging.

I was the kind of nervous that sprouted from unfamiliarity. I was about to drive a strange car across a town in a country where I didn’t speak the language, at night with my (lack of) sense of direction.

My sister asked, “Do you want me to go with you?” I knew she would gladly keep me company. Perhaps if we crammed both of our directional inabilities together, we’d have about half of a good one. (We both went out the wrong door in Chedraui the first time and couldn’t remember where the car was.) But I said, “No, that’s okay.” Despite my nerves, I wanted to do this by myself.

We had a grand old time driving the jalopy the 20 minutes through downtown.

The night air was the perfect temperature, wafting across our skin like salt-kissed reassurance. My friend’s son enjoyed the wind tousling his hair in the backseat.

We drove through downtown, where nightlife was in full swing on a Friday evening. Bands played on the streets, club music floated out of buildings, and people strolled the sidewalk. Downtown Cozumel isn’t large, but it was bustling. I crept along behind other cars waiting for pedestrians to cross and slowing to almost a stop before every tope (speed bump).

Drivers in Cozumel seem laid back and considerate.

They always pull over to let faster traffic pass, and there was no yelling of expletives. (Everyone knows the Spanish curse words.) Even when I did idiot things like accidentally block up traffic while trying to make a left turn, no one honked. They just sat there patiently and waited for me to finish turning. It was a damned sight different than that time I drove around Boston making mistakes in an unfamiliar bustling city amongst blaring horns and middle fingers.

I delivered my friends to their hotel, then made sure Maps was set to take me home before driving away. “You okay?” my friend checked. “Yeah,” I replied, “Have a good night!” Me and my only directional salvation, Google, headed off into the night back the way I’d come.

It wasn’t hard.

It was only 20 minutes and few turns to get back, but I paid close attention, checking the map often. I kept in mind the advice my sister had given me about what to do if I got pulled over. Apparently, the normal protocol for a ticket is to go with the police officers immediately to pay it. The appropriate question to ask if you don’t want to do that but want to maintain plausible deniability is, ¿Cuánto hay que pagar aquí? (“How much to pay it here?”)

As I made my way slowly back through downtown past Chedraui, which was now a familiar landmark, and managed not to miss the turn onto the one-way road, I relaxed. I parked in front of our place, killed the lights and the engine and walked in to greet my sister, just finishing cleaning the kitchen. “Everything go okay?” she asked.

“Yep, just fine,” I said with a grin, and we went to bed.

I’d needed to do this small thing just outside my comfort zone — to prove I could, not to anyone else, but to myself. I wanted to know I could still do the things that need doing — taking a friend home, navigating an unfamiliar city, driving an iffy car, figuring out how to buy milk in Spanish — even when they made my stomach clench up a little.

It’s like self-esteem maintenance.

I have a pretty good foundation there, but sometimes it needs some shoring up, some extra mortar between the bricks, and that’s what driving that night was for me.

A couple of days later, the speedometer on our little red car stopped working, so we did our best to go with the flow of traffic. When we were caught in a thunderstorm deluge on what my kiddo called our “fake road trip” around the southern tip of the island, my sister drove slow, and I used my hat to funnel drips off the back of my neck. When the “check engine” light came on the second-to-last day, we checked the oil. It was good, so we decided, since we weren’t driving much further, to just ignore it.

My sister and me on our “fake road trip” around the southern coast of Cozumel. Gage did not come with us; he stayed in the room catching up on Pokemon Go and Geometry Dash. Here’s why we don’t always hang out together on vacation.

I’ve never gone striding out of my comfort zone easily.

When I was very little, my mom took me off into some trees at the park. She said, “We’re going on an adventure!” It was a small copse, but to me, it must’ve felt like a vast forest. As we stepped into the shade, I started looking worried and said, near tears, “No more ‘venture!” My comfort zone was threatened by a few cottonwoods a mile from our house.

But I have learned that the feeling of accomplishment and self-assurance that can come with conquering something a little scary often make it worth it. A big part of my motivation was not comfort zone jumping for the mere practice of it, but for practical reasons. I didn’t drive that nutty car around the island JUST to prove I could. I did it to prove I could do it when I needed to — when it was a useful thing to do. That not-an-inside car was just the right amount of ‘venture. It was a challenge, both technically and mentally, but not so far out as to have my brain shut down in terror.

This brings me to a related point: Unless the plane is imminently going down in a ball of fire to crash on the craggy peaks of an ice-capped mountain, you are never ever ever going to get me to go skydiving.