I was busy being a manly man at our campground at Casa Cristal. I swept the floors, vacuumed and shook out our floor mats. Layne cleaned and cooked vegetables for our dinner of pork and chicken hash over rice. While she did that I went outside and started greasing the constant velocity joints on our front wheels.
On the advice of our mechanic in Ohio we put heavy duty after market constant velocity joints to handle the strain of rough roads over many miles. Which is great but they do need lubricating every few thousand miles and that requires me to crawl under the front of the van with a grease gun. It takes five minutes but invariably I come out looking like I’ve been stoking a steam engine so it’s not my favorite task.
The campground was packed and we enjoyed some up close and personal intertwining from a young couple to whom I was starting to feel compelled to offer some private time on our bed. But I don’t suppose I really want to be responsible for more Salvadorans appearing in this overcrowded country than there are already. I left them to it in their spacious enough station wagon.
It was in short a busy Sunday morning in the campground. Layne plotted a route for us to take on Monday to drive the road of flowers, a series of tourist attractions in the north of the country and I got out our DeWalt tire inflator to check the pressures. And then Fernando showed up.
He lives in San Salvador the capital and he runs an air conditioning business and what’s more he lives to travel. He has a son in business in Milan in the north of Italy and he has traveled all over Europe. Periodically he loads his family in his Toyota Land Cruiser and they go camping across Central America.
He doesn’t like visiting the United States much anymore he says because there’s too much stress and he fears violence. A co bit ironic that as many Americans would say the same about travel the other way around. But we also got into the subject of the clean iOverlander of His own country.
He agreed the Civil War was terrible but he argued that what came after was worse. The gang violence and mobster oppression across the country was unbearable from barefaced robbery to mafia type protection rackets no one was safe. He lost his home and had to move into an apartment over his business when he got death threats for not paying protection money. He’s really happy with the way things are now in the country with the presidents clean up of organized crime. 
He’s happy with the way things are in his country after a long period of darkness and he loves the US dollar as his currency as it allows him to travel cheap among his neighboring countries. He was familiar with our rooftop a/c -a Coleman unit- and said he is buying a rooftop tent in San Salvador for his Toyota. Car camping is becoming increasingly popular among the middle class.
You need anything he said in parting, give me a call.
And so we take to the road to explore the road of flowers.
With greased joints and proper tire pressures I trust our biggest problem will be pronouncing the names of the towns we drive through.
