My car passed its Portuguese Matriculation test yesterday, which is one of the biggest hurdles in this whole relocation game.
The last week of getting it ready for this test has been the most stressed I've been since I quit work
Honestly, the back half of last week was totally car dominated with my stressing out massively about making sure my car got through this test, which has a reputation for being ruthless.
In the last week I've had to make two hour long round trips to get the lights changed - the first was a false start because of a mechanic being out of action (hopefully not Covid, but it's certainly possible) but thankfully the second, on Friday, everything went OK, but that took the whole morning and well into the afternoon.
Then Friday and literally the whole of Saturday I had to sort out some scratches on my body work - a lot of scratches. Why I left this to the last minute I don't know.
Friday P.M. and Saturday....
If you've ever done body work yourself before you'll know how long this takes - filler, sanding, primer, painting, varnish, compound, polish. And waits in between to let everything dry.
All of this would have been fine except I had a LOT of scratches to cover up:
And it was on-off raining all of Saturday afternoon, which meant I had to dry off the car between every coat, and getting it DRY takes a while.
I did the initial clean and filling in on Friday P.M. I completely overdid the filler and this meant a lot of extra sanding, which took about a couple of hours.
I then spent ALL of Saturday finishing off the sanding, and then spraying with Primer and the main body colour.
The rain meant I had to wait longer than I'd expected between coats and the wind didn't help either. Seriously, it was proper storm-windy.
It ended up with me getting on the beers at about 20.00 and then finishing it off with a head torch at 2.00 a.m. - it was a clear night even if the day was shitty, so I took advantage of it.
Sunday
Sunday morning I spent dealing with my windscreen wipers - one of them had decided to go floppy on me a few days back and my plan to pick up a spare locally didn't work out because the exact model of wiper I need to fit my car is only available from the UK, which meant I had to resort to super glue.
I'd picked up two varieties just in case - regular all purpose in these cute little tubes and then 'difficult plastic' glue - with two liquids you need to join together.
What further complicated matters was that I couldn't figure out how to get my damn wiper blade off, so I had to fix it while it was still attached.
I had everything ready, with the regular glue first of all, only to find it had already hardened in the tubes, all three of them. Shoddy product.
So then I had to resort to the more complex (although probably better) double compound product, which required some Google translating of very small text, which takes ages to type in.
Anyway, I finally sorted one front wiper - thankfully only one - the large one on the front and then with the rear one I had to strip a blade off another new blade I'd bought and glue the whole thing onto the arm.
All of this took about 2 hours.
Then I hoovered the entire inside of the car and washed it - another hour.
Then compound and polishing - which I think made it look worse. This is how it ended up:
Now it's far from perfect, but given the rain and the wind and having to rush, I'll take that!
Sunday evening I just did a quick double check of everything - thankfully I remembered to put my wheel locking nuts back in with the spare wheel, but some air in the tyres, and that was that.
Monday 9.00 a.m - the test
I had the test booked for 9.00 a.m. which meant I had to wake up at 7.15 to get ready and get there on time. This in turn meant that I went to bed on Sunday night feeling as if it was a work day the next day - something I hadn't felt since I quit full-time work almost three years ago now!
I left early, gave the car a quick pressure wash en route and arrived at the test centre at 8.50 to find the gates still closed and a queue of six cars already.
Then a queue at reception - THANKFULLY someone else came along and asked everyone 'if they had an appointment' which I understood - and I just followed her lead and Q jumped.
Got the paperwork sorted - bit of a language struggle, but I got there, paid the 70 EU, waited about 30 mins and then the test.
The inspector was VERY REASONABLE I must say.
He was a bit OCD I think. He spent about 10 minutes trying to change the odometer to KM from miles - NB this isn't a requirement to pass the test (I knew this already) but I think he just got the idea in his head - he finally gave up (You can't change it, I'd told him) then he failed to find the engine number, gave up and started the test.
Interestingly you get to go into the testing area, unlike in the UK, so I witnessed the whole inspection and got to sit-in while it was on one of the jiggle machines - and I saw the handbrake pull the car back off the rollers part - I was a bit worried about that, I thought I'd fucked it by driving with it on at one point.
I was also worried about a puncture repair I'd done, I thought that might fail it, but no.
And he hardly even looked at the wipers.
The damn engine number
At the end of the manual safety stuff we finally found the engine number. Finding it took 25 minutes - we knew where it was, but it was right at the bottom of the engine and required a torch and flexible camera probe to get in there - and it had been pin punched on super faint, so you could JUST make it out.
Why on earth they don't put it somewhere more visible I don't know?
Passed!
I had to wait about another 20-30 mins at the end for the paper work to be done - and I got some more paperwork - my matriculation form completed and two pass certificates - I think one is for matriculation one for just regular Portuguese driving.
I went and bought some beer and I'm drinking that now.
What a stressful experience! But I think, I HOPE, that's the biggest hurdle dealt with - now it's a 4 hour round trip tomorrow to drop off the paperwork to my agent, but at least that's now a pleasure drive rather than being stress, a victory lap if you like!