It is Saturday and our first really big weekend staying here at the apartment in Rio Hato / Playa Blanca. We wanted to attempt a weekend of just enjoying our time here and using, at least a little, of the resources that came with our apartment.
First thing this morning I went on a scouting mission on foot to the far side of the lagoon to see if I could figure out how we get to it and if there really was a playground over there for the girls. It wasn’t a bad walk, although it was pretty warm, and I managed to discover how the resort was laid out and now I have a far better idea of where everything is or is likely to be.
We decided to take the kids to the playground and to the lagoon for the day. We are going to have a nice, relaxing day and let the kids do stuff that they have been wanting to do. It’s an “all kids” day, basically.
We got the kids ready and took the long, hot walk over to the lagoon. We started at the playground which was quite nice and basically empty. The girls had fun but did not play for nearly as long as we had thought or hoped. They have been so playground deprived for so long that we were sure that they were going to spend hours on there. It was a nice playground too and on grass which was nice given the heat. But they only played for twenty minutes or maybe half an hour tops before wanting to go into the lagoon.
The lagoon is the largest salt water pool in the new world and the second largest in the world after one in Dubai (of course.) There were a few dozen people in it so it was essentially empty. The distance between us and the nearest people was many times the length of a normal pool.
The girls swam on their own for a while. The pool was really shallow, only a few inches, near the beach which made it really easy for the girls to ease into it and just play in the water. Dominica and I sat out on the beach chairs for a while. I picked us up piña coladas from the beach bar which were pretty good. This was more of how we pictured Panamá.
After a while Liesl and Ciana were really hungry so I put in an hour walking around trying to find how to get food. I managed to get the resort kitchen to open and make us the one thing that we could eat from their menu – octopus ceviche! It took a really long time and I had to deliver the food a very long way across the resort but I got the food to the family and the girls liked it but ate very little of it. Dominica and I ate most of it. It was pretty good.
After the food the girls went back into the lagoon. I went in to watch them and to cool off a little and this is when disaster struck…. I had had my phone in my swimsuit pocket while exploring the resort looking for food and did not realize it as I am normally very careful not to do that and the water got higher than I knew before I thought about the fact that it was hitting my pockets and when I reached down to my pocket to check…. my phone was already submerged in the salt water.
So that was that. The phone wasn’t just in bad shape, it was completely and utterly dead. Nothing left to it. Not even a flicker. This is pretty bad as we are in rural Panamá and there is absolutely no way to do anything about the phone from here.
That turned a fun day into a really stressful one.
We stayed at the lagoon for a couple more hours before coming back to the apartment for an hour or two to shower, cool down and relax. We had finally figured out where the Lebanese restaurant in the complex was located and decided to try it out tonight.
In the evening we walked to the resort again and went to Beirut for dinner. It was good, not fantastic, but good. A little difficult to order as the menu was Arabic food in Spanish with zero English to assist us.
Dinner was nice and we really appreciated the change of pace that it provided for us that we were able to go to a regular restaurant.