Border Disputes (Honduras)

Sunday we woke up early and headed out to Nicaragua at about 8:30. The drive was initially pretty straight forward. Jared wasn't feeling that well, so I took over driving, while Nicole was my navigator. We hit the Honduran border, and got flagged for inspection. We headed into the police inspection site on the El Salvadorean side, where the officers we surprised that we stopped as that stop was usually for people coming into the country. After about 40 minutes of getting passed back and forth between two officers, they told us to leave without even looking at the car, uh. We then breezed through to Honduras, where things came to a bit of a stand still.
 There was no electricity...and the customs officer was at lunch...so paperwork was very backed up. We ended up having to walk back across the El Salvador border for copies, before finally being able to finish everything with a handwritten note attached to our paperwork saying it was incomplete, because there was no electricity for printing. The entire process took 3 hours, which worried me as I had budgeted 3 hours for both border crossings. The Honduras drive was easy. We were a bit worried, because at the border initially, we were warned that cops pull people over after the border and check to make sure you have all the required emergency equipment, including orange warning triangles, which we did not, and that they could fine us up to $100. However, Nicole and I discoverer we can double-team a cop right out of his wits. We got pulled over twice and both times ended up chatting about our trip and surfing; giggling and eyelash batting works like a charm down here! Putty in our hands. We quickly passed through to the next border to enter Nicaragua. This is when things got messy.
Customs officers sometime do not back down. We didn't have enough money between the three of us to pay to enter Nicaragua, but had already been stamped out of Honduras. I begged them to allow me to leave Jared and Nicole with the officers while I drove 20 kilometers up the road to the ATM. One officer went for it, the second did not and said we had to go back to Honduras. When we arrived back at the customs office, migration was willing to give us back our paperwork, while customs was not, which meant that we could not take the car. After a bit of begging and pleading, he said we could leave Nicole alone at the border and drive an HOUR back to the closest town with an Atm. As we had no choice, Jared and I got headed back to find money, just as the sun was setting. Probably the worst time I've had thus far, as I was beside myself about leaving Nicole in the dark on the side of the street at the border. We finally found an Atm an hour and 20 minutes later, and booked it back to the Honduras-Nicaragua border. We finally paid all our fines, and started into Nicaragua at 10pm...with one headlight. Thankfully, the roads were pristine, but we did decide to park it in the first town anyway. You never know what border towns are going to be like, but the roads in Central America can be very unpredictable, and we did not want another Guatemala driving situation, so we opted for the lesser of two evils. We lucked out and stayed in a very nice town called Somoto and cheap hotel that had a locked gate for the car. By the end of that night, we were all tired and snappy, but happy to be safe and through the border.