Some weeks don’t make it to #vanlife social media. Living in a mechanics shop, taking emergency measures to recharge the house batteries, navigation errors, and simply trying to exist in 95-degree heat when our “home” is jet-black and has no AC, the past seven days contained nearly all of the worst-case scenarios imagined when we first started this journey. And we got through it. Sometimes a bit worse for wear, sometimes with lessons learned, and always just plain tired. But we also proved to ourselves that we can weather these kinds of weeks, and even spin some aspects into a positive light despite the difficulties.

One of my biggest questions when Vrinda first broached the idea of living in a van was “What do folks do when their car needs service?” Her answer: “They figure it out.” And now that we are a part of “they,” I can tell you that that’s all you really can do. We pulled into Santa Tecla (a suburb of San Salvador - the capital) on Friday with a car shuttering while idling and rapidly declining gas mileage. On iOverlander - an essential app with crowd-sourced locations for all vanlife needs - V found a shop that others had turned to in their times of need. Unfortunately, the ownership had just changed hands… to an even nicer and more accommodating businessman. He let us “live” in their waiting room (with AC!) during the day while they worked in the car, and we would be able to return to our bed in the van at night. Once the cause of our issues was identified (a loose spark plug nut) it was late on Saturday, and servicing the welder needed to reattach the piece was not going to happen until Monday. This meant three days of making a mechanics warehouse our home, not exactly the easiest but better than needing to abandon our home altogether.

Not the most glamorous or insightful snapshots of our time at the garage, but you get the idea.

And we figured it out. Santa Tecla turned out to be a pretty nice little town, and with no ability to leave it, we set about exploring. A bustling weekend night market featured food, drink, and trinket stalls and live music. We had some of the best chili paneer we’ve ever had at the local Indian restaurant (are you surprised at this point?): we wondered if the secret was the chef substituting more local ingredients and adapting them into the typical recipe. We attended a Salvadoran Premier League match, where the home team treated the small but raucous crowd to a well-earned 3-1 victory. And the shop owner was kind enough to host us for laundry and showers on Sunday night, which were both badly needed given the minimal amount of privacy we had in our home. We cannot overstate how nice he and his wife treated us; as we were leaving the next day, he brought us a couple of cakes from their growing bakery, an incredible treat for a couple of nomads with no ability to bake goods of our own. We were grateful to finally be able to leave on Monday afternoon as our car work was completed, but realized how lucky we were to have such a gracious host.

Soccer game on left and too many pupusas on the right.

Out of one situation and straight into another. One of the reasons we were eager to leave was that our house batteries had emptied while stuck in the shop with no sun or running alternator to charge them. Late in the day, we drove to San Salvador to find a spot to spend the night where we could then walk to museums and stores the next day. Between the dark and our exhaustion, however, we unwittingly parked under a tree that provided shade to our car for much of the next day as we walked around. Nice for temperature control, but not so nice for solar power. We returned after a long day of walking around to find that our batteries had again died, forcing a now extremely tired couple back into the driver’s seat to find a new parking spot with much more focus on ready access to sun in the morning.

San Salvador is an extremely modern city, although not really our style for this trip (it didn’t help that the main museum was closed both days we were there). We left, ready to get back to nature, finding success in this endeavor for about 12 hours. We took in some local waterfalls and made it to a beach on the Pacific for sunset, both of which were refreshing after the journey there. The highlight, however, was going to be re-joining our friends from Guatemala at a beach house they had a couple of hours down the coast. Was going to be. In an effort to avoid a crash, Google Maps tried sending us down nearly impassable backroads. A switch to Waze led to an error in location entry, a mistake realized only after we had crossed the major river splitting the country, and we were therefore two hours past our friends. Frustrated and tired, we decided to keep driving forward instead of retracing our steps. We arrived in La Unión - a coastal city on the country’s far east coast - late at night and completely drained. The week was finally getting to us, and we were starting to take it out on each other as we drove through the town to find a place to park, eventually settling for a busy and loud street for an unpleasant night of rest.

We lasted less than 24 hours in the city. Despite being maritime “winter,” temperatures reached 95 by midday the next day. With little ability to spread out, open our doors, or find shade, it was much hotter inside the car. Easily the worst experience in a week full of unpleasant ones. We ran a couple of errands quickly and vowed to get out of the town as quickly as possible, needing to find somewhere where we could rest and recuperate. Overall, a very rough end to an already long week.