Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep

My horn goes off whenever it feels like it, and won't stop until it tires itself out after about five minutes. This has been going on now for about three weeks, since I had some air conditioning work done on the car.

The horn starts all by itself, whether I'm driving the car or the car is parked. The first time it happened, I was driving around Santa Ana. Everyone looked at me as I made my way to Chichi, my newest mechanic. Once there, Chichi took out the fuse to make the beeping stop. He looked at the wires and couldn't find anything out of place. He told me to bring the car back the next day, and he would give it to his cousin who does electrical work.

The next morning, I brought the car to Chichi's and walked home. The following day I picked up the car and paid about $15 for a new horn and a new fuse. I thought the problem was solved. That afternoon, while the car was parked in my garage, the horn started in again. Inside the confines of the garage, that horn just about burst my eardrums. I opened the hood, opened the fuse box, and yanked out the fuse the way I had seen Chichi do it. My body continued to vibrate after the beeping stopped.

Then I called my friend, Moe, a Canadian mechanic two towns over in Cariari. I made an appointment to bring him my car. He tried to open up the steering wheel, but he didn't have the special six-sided wrench with a pinhole in the middle. Meanwhile, I'm riding around in a time bomb, never knowing when the horn is going to go off again.

The car went over a week without beeping. I didn't know if it was done tooting at will or if it would happen some night at 3am, or toot when it was parked somewhere and I didn't hear it and it wore down my battery.

I found out last Sunday at the feria. I parked my car downtown, took my daily walk up and down the hilly streets, shopped at the farmers' market, and returned to my car. The watchee man (guard) who knows me said that my horn was honking for about five minutes then stopped. Arrgh. I got in the car and honked the horn, but it wouldn't honk. Now that was just plain mean. It had beeped itself out.

There's an expat resource I turn to when I need a question answered. It's Costa Rica Living, a Yahoo group. So I posted a query, looking for a car electrical mechanic. I got a response and called the guy on Sunday. He understood and problems and was willing to come to my house the next day. But that Monday morning when I called to confirm, he said he didn't have the tools necessary to work on my car. He recommended that I take it to the Nissan (expensive) dealer in San Jose.

Desperate at this point, I called the Nissan dealership and made an appointment for a week later. They said they would need my car two days, which is probably not true, but I will have to leave it there and take the bus home in the rain, and bus back the next day to pick it up.

In the meantime, I am driving around without a horn in a very horn-friendly city.

Beep beep