Posted On: Friday - July 17th 2026 4:50PM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media Cars Geography Peak Stupidity Roadshow
Peak Stupidity finally got around to reporting on our 1 1/2 year ago trip to Uruguay in this post and that post. The map above, if readable, shows the town of Colonia del Sacramento (Colonia do Sacromento in its Portuguese speaking days - Uruguay used to be part of Brazil), nearly the closest spot across the the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
We took a 3 hour or so bus rid from Montevideo west to Colonia for a couple of days' stay. I like the place, MUCH better than Montevideo. Perhaps this is due to my not liking big cities in general. (Fine for a visit, but...)
I'll have more pictures of this small city of 32,200 people in another post. I had to do this once I came across this picture in my files:
I'd taken a 3 hour walk by myself this one fine December Summer morning, so maybe it was 6 miles, allowing the time I took taking pictures. On the way back toward the city, I came across this Gomeria. Ah, this was really funny, almost!
See, I took a 6 week Spanish class many years ago, and from memories of Tijuana too, I know that the suffix "ria" denotes a retail business. A zapateria is a shoe shore, zapatas being shoes (I recall a lot from that great teacher), "cafeteria" comes from Spanish too, well, and gonorrhea an diarrhea have been in the news lately too. You can GET them at a retail business... so yeah, but the humor comes from a couple of old B&W TV shows.
The guy on the left is Gomer Pyle from the old show Gomer Pyle: USMC, a spin-off, as they called it, of The Andrew Griffith Show, in which appeared Gomer's TV brother, car mechanic Goober.* (Hence the phrase "What a goober!")
Now, that's a lot of background just to explain why I enjoyed seeing that sign for the car shop in Colonia del Sacramento. It should have rightly been a Gooberia. End of joke.
At least I THINK it was a shade tree mechanic's shop. I'm not going back to Uruguay just to find out.
But.... there's google maps now! I see 10 or so Gomerias in Colonia, and it's obvious they ARE auto shops. I remember roughly my route, so I can see that the shop must have been what's labeled the Gomeria Nuematicos Colonia on the overhead map, BUT the google car came through a decade earlier. Ahhaa, from the street view the building nearby that looks similar was then the Gomeria Carfer I think, because that first letter was either blocked by a Sycamore-type tree or the Winter northeastern sunrise as the google man drove by. They advertised Dunlap tires.
That old silver Euro-mobile (I KNOW readers here could tell me) was not yet up on blocks. Hmmm, maybe that used to be the google car.
That was an episode of Andy Griffith featuring car mechanic Goober, who took a car apart enough to rebuild it inside the police station. Floyd, at least, is pretty amused.
Well, that was fun!
* Gomer Pyle, played by actor Jim Nabors, appeared at least once on The Andy Griffith Show.
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