Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is our final day in Rio Hato and Playa Blanca.  Much of the day was spent packing as Dominica worked to get us ready for the trip.  I had he day off from work as it was a travel logistics day for everyone as we all make our way to the company retreat in the Adirondacks.

The driver from National picked me up at ten and I was back before eleven with yet another Toyota Yaris.  This must be the only car that anyone can afford here.  I’ve definitely learned that Toyota is what you get when you can’t find a Kia dealer.  These cars are not good and today’s was the worst one yet with really sloppy steering.

It took a few hours to get the car packed, the apartment cleaned up and everything ready to go but by mid-afternoon we were done in Rio Hato and on the PanAmerican highway headed east to Panama City for the last time.

We got to the DoubleTree in Panama City in good time and with minimal effort.  We know how to drive around the city now and can get where we want to go pretty easily.  It’s really no issue at all to drive the city.  The girls are excited to be back in the hotel as they like it here.  This time we have a corner suite (again on the Honors floor) with a neat little all-windowed corner perfect for the girls to set up their toys and play in.

We decided that we were super lazy today and needed our rest so we plugged the MacBook into the television, put on Modern Family and ordered in room service and called it a night.  We did nothing all evening and it was awesome.  Our flight out of Panama is tomorrow morning.

Today is our last full day in Rio Hato.  I was up early this morning, around seven, and found that our Internet access had been cut off.  I am getting an account issue with the ISP.  It turned of at 5am.  I could tell because I had left open a Steam chat window with Rachel last night and it said when the Internet went down.

So, no means of working today.  No Internet and my phone is gone!  What a day.  We tried all day, the apartment owners had people come over several times to look at the equipment because he didn’t believe us that the service was down.  It was kind of a rough day.

The upside was that it was a little easier to get packing done today and I got a chance to play some video games.  My first game of the day was Moebius: Empire Rising which I was able to sit down and play through, completing it, which was really nice.  I thought that that game was going to last me for quite a long time.  It was a lot of fun to be able to focus on it and really play through it.

After Moebius, I played through the intro of Cognition which is made by much of the same team and writers.  This looks to be another awesome game but the intro was too intense and I had to stop playing it with the girls around because they cannot watch it and as long as I am playing it they are going to try to watch it.

So after that I switched to playing Broken Sword, the same game that Dominica and I played on the Game Boy Advance back around 2002 when we were dating and had bought GBAs for each other and had that game.  We had gotten near to the end and something was wrong with the game cartridge and we were never able to actually finish the game.

I spent much of the afternoon playing the game alone at the kitchen table.  But once I was near where Dominica and I had gotten stuck so many years ago, far more than a decade ago, we hooked the laptop up to the television and the whole family gathered around for a really fun video game evening where we all played through the final hour or two of Broken Sword and actually managed to see the ending this time!

We had a good time and called it a night early.  Our travels home start tomorrow.

There was still no hint of Internet when we went to bed.

It is Wednesday today and we are nearly done with our time in Panamá.  Only tomorrow left to go and then we head for Panama City and the airport and we are on our way back to the U.S.A. for a few weeks.  We are sad to be leaving Panamá, we do not feel at all that we got enough time here either to relax and just soak it in or to get out and explore the region but we knew going into it that this was our first trip to Central America and that it was going to be a quick one just fitting in between other things that we had scheduled.  It is what it is and we are very glad that we at least had the chance to check out Panamá and Central America and we are quite excited that we are heading to Nicaragua in a month and will get to be spending at least twice as long there as we got to be here (arriving in September and staying until December.)

We are attempting to eat all of the food that we have stockpiled in the house.  Dominica has been making breakfast burritos many mornings.  They are great, especially with the local Panamanian habañero sauce.

Dominica took the girls down to the pool today.  They had a nice, long swim today.  Liesl is getting so good at swimming.  She has not used her floatation devices in a while and is getting to the point that she can swim all over on her own.

Today ended up being a super busy one at work and I worked until around midnight.  It was an exhausting day but we got a lot accomplished.

Our time in Panamá is rapidly coming to a close.  Today is Tuesday and we only have two more days here in Playa Blanca and one more day in Panama City before we fly back to Texas (and I fly on to New York.)  It feels like we just got here but we have already been here for a month.

Today is Liesl’s first day of controlling her scheduling for home school.  Yesterday she spoke to Dominica about how she hates being surprised with school suddenly at random times of the day (I have been saying that I felt that this was the case for a long time.)

It was actually really nice outside today.  Cool enough that I was able to sit out and work outside the entire day without sweating, this might be the first day like this since we came to Panamá.  Overcast, coolish and not so oppressively humid.  It was very nice.  It also meant that the loud air conditioning units were not running non-stop all day which makes working outside far nicer as well.

Dominica and I were up early this morning.  We are still in Panama City enjoying our time at the DoubleTree downtown.  We got up around six so that we could get all ready and get back out to Playa Blanca before it was time for me to work.

We drove right out west to Rio Hato after breakfast.  No issues on the drive, it was quick and easy.  Plenty of time to get there before work started.

This afternoon, before returning the rental car, we ran out to Anton and went grocery shopping for the last time.  This is it, just the final “top up” of the most critical groceries to get us through the home stretch in Panamá.

At four I returned the rental car.  No more driving for us until it is time to leave the country.