Sheep Guarding Llama

Not nearly as hot today.  Today was totally overcast but still quite warm.  Each day we keep looking at the weather report which tells us that there is going to be a day full of thunderstorms and every day not even a drop of rain comes our way.  Even actively during the day I check the weather and it says that it is currently raining and I look outside and still, nothing at all.

Dominica and I spent the whole morning and much of the afternoon sitting outside on the balcony.  I am pretty burnt all over from yesterday but there is no sun at all today.  I did get to see the sunrise coming up over the Pacific this morning which is very cool.

In the middle of the day today our water got turned off for some reason.  We heard a lot of banging noises around the same time so we assumed that there was some construction going on in the building that we had not been informed of and so tried not to worry about it too much even though we have no car here so having no water is potentially a pretty major issue for us.  Thankfully it was only off for about an hour and did not affect us too much.

In the afternoon I moved inside and worked while standing up in the kitchen which is nice for not needing to sit all of the time and keeps me moving around a lot more.  It is hard not to become heavily sedentary when you work on a computer all day, especially when it is a laptop and the only seats in the apartment are lounge style seats and not even good for eating at the dining room table let alone typing at it!  But standing works pretty well, even though the floors are super hard tile.  That’s how homes are in Panamá, tile floors everywhere to keep things cool.

Later this afternoon Dominica took the girls down to the pool behind the apartment so that they could go swimming, which they did for several hours.  I stayed in the apartment to work and found the time to be pretty productive.

The girls have started testing out Spanish television here today.  We have cable here and there are a number of channels for them.  We found Nick Jr. which has shows like Dora the Explorer and Dora Friends, all completely in Spanish.  They watched them anyway, which is good as maybe they will pick something up.

I got a lot of work while everyone was out at the pool.  And by the time that they came back it was rather dark already.  They love being able to swim anytime that they want.

Dominica’s ankle was really bothering her today and so she went to bed really early and just lay down and read for much of the later evening.  Luciana put herself to bed pretty early.  Liesl stayed up rather late watching her new show Mia and Me or something like that.

I ended up working until around two thirty in the morning but was very productive and got some great work done so I was really happy that I had stayed up.  We had a big thunderstorm up to the north near El Valle tonight that I got to watch which was pretty cool, but none of it made it close enough to us for us to even hear the thunder let alone get any drops of rain.

It is Tuesday and today I decided that this is Panama and I should attempt to spend some time outside enjoying all that Panama has to offer.  So I figured out how to move out to and work from the balcony.  There was a lot of sun coming down today, barely a cloud in the sky, which seems pretty crazy as not only the forecast was calling for it to be continuous thunderstorms but the weather app on my phone was telling me that it was thunderstorms currently all through the day even though there wasn’t the slightest hint of rain or a storm at any point.

Since the balcony is completely covered and everyone that we see is outside in bathing suits, I decided to just work without a shirt today and see if I could at least generate some Vitamin D or get a little colour from some reflected light or something.  I was not out in the sun the entire day so I figured that I would not actually end up getting a tan or anything.

The heat index for where we are today was 44 degrees Celsius which is just over 111 degrees Fahrenheit.  It was pretty warm out there.  I was at least smart enough to keep my hat on all day long.  In fact I was running it under water every time that I came inside so that I could keep my head cool, a trick that I learned while I was in Spain with all of the fuente everywhere.

By the end of the day, even though I never saw sunlight directly, I was pretty much completely burnt.  Not good planning on my part.

This evening, once it got dark, we all went out for a walk and took the girls down to the Pacific ocean.  It was a frustrating walk because there is no signage or obvious way to get to the beach and everything is owned by a hotel between us and the beach so we were unable to figure out where we were supposed to be going in order to get there.  We had to walk all over, get stopped by security and eventually get the right directions, then someone corrected them with wrong directions but we finally got there.  It is relatively easy if you know ahead of time where to go, but without any signs it is pretty much anyone’s guess.

Once we got to the beach it was pretty nice.  Most of the sand was black and the Pacific water was warm.  Both girls went out and played in the water.  I went down to watch them and Dominica sat high up on the sand bank.  The girls had a blast running down into the water and letting it chase them as they ran back.  Luciana ended up getting knocked down by a wave and was soaked and dirty but she was happy and played a lot longer getting knocked down several times and possibly ruining her clothes.

It was a long walk back to the condo with very wet children.  Liesl was only wet from the knees down but Ciana was soaked head to toe and covered in sand which made her very unhappy.

Once back to the condo we had to hose Luciana off.  She hates (or hated) taking showers and was very upset that she had to take one.  Both Liesl and I talked to her for a while trying to get her to relax about taking.  She claims that she is afraid to get water in her eyes.  Liesl tried to show her what to do in the shower but to no avail.

Finally I figured out to put a hand towel over Luciana’s head and she decided to just lay down in the shower.  The shower in the girls’ bathroom is a nice, large tile one, very modern.  Perfect for the girls.  The one in the master bath is kind of awful, we hate it.  But theirs is great.  Luciana ended up taking a very odd shower laying down with the water hitting her back and her head under a tower but she loved it.  She stayed in for a long time and is now demanding that she get to take a shower again tomorrow!  Where did this kid come from?  She is so funny.

Today is my first day working from Panama.  Our Internet connection here is pretty good.  It is not super fast, but it does appear to be quite solid.  I am getting something like 3Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up.  Good enough for work and for the girls to be streaming their videos and we appear to have pretty good coverage throughout the condo on the wifi and there is TMobile 3G in most of the condo too.  Our power here is not super solid, we have gotten a few momentary brown outs and today we had a less than five second blackout.  Nothing major, but the power is less than ideal, but nothing that is surprising for rural Panama.

It is super bright, sunny and hot today.  We spent the day inside, I tried working from the living room today using the low coffee table most of the day and leaning over to work on it.  That worked okay but is not going to be ideal for a long term work position.

At noon I went out with the car, our white Toyota Yaris from National to return it.  I drove into Rio Hato, which we have not been in before, just a few hundred meters west of our resort.  I was very lucky to find that there is a nice gas station right there.  Like in Europe, they use 95 octane fuel here.  But unlike Europe with is 95 for low grade and 98 for high, here it is 95 for high and 91 for low.  So weird how every region has different fuel.

Getting the car fueled up was easy.  That could easily have been really hard so I am quite happy about that.   Then I drove west through town to scout it out just because this was my last window of time with the Yaris before turning it in and we would otherwise have no idea what lay just a mile to the west.  Not much, is the answer, but there is a village there but there does not appear to be anything to do in it.

To return the car I had to go back east just a little ways to just before the airport and go down to the resort there.  This turned out to be super easy and finding National was no problem at all.  It was five till one when I pulled in but they were closed for siesta or something, even thought their online hours said that they were open all day.  So I had to drive back home and continue working for two more hours before returning around three to drop off the car.

Everything went smoothly with the drop off and they drove me back to the condo which made everything very easy.

I worked for the rest of the day.  Everyone is still a little bit tired from all of the travel and stuff so we were still taking it pretty easy today.  This is nice having nothing planned for the whole week and nothing to do but live our normal lives here at the condo.  Today is Monday, Paul and Bob are supposed to be arriving in Panama City on Thursday but they are going to hang out with family and friends there and I will not see them until Saturday morning, is the current plan.

So at this point, we have no car.  It is just us living on the beach in more or less the middle of nowhere in rural Coclé, Panamá.  This will be interesting.

 

This is it, our first day in Panama!  Our first full day, anyway.  We started off the morning with coffee out on the balcony.  It was pretty hot today, in the mid 90s with a heat index that was really something given the incredibly amount of humidity.  The moment that you step outside your glasses fog up.

Our big task for the day was to get groceries.  We only have a rental car for today so it is imperative that we deal with that because after tomorrow afternoon we are going to be completely sans transportation, which is more than a little bit scary as our condo is way, way out in the middle of nowhere.  There is nothing near us at all, other than the ocean.  There are no restaurants, shops, nothing.  No grocery stores or anything, that we know of.  Once we get our food and turn over the car we are more or less isolated out here until we rent a car again or bum a ride from someone.

The drove back along the highway to Coronado is almost exactly half an hour.  We got to do it in the daylight today, which was nice.  We could see where the cows had been last night at the end of our road and it is even stranger by day to see it because they had apparently come through a shopping center that is being built and were going into a cemetery!  So odd.

The drive back was fine.  We started at Subway getting something to eat since I had accidentally gotten the wrong bread for Liesl last night and she did not want to eat what I had gotten her so she really wanted to eat at Subway, it being her favourite restaurant.  The Subways here are certainly not up to par with the ones in the US.  It was okay but I have no desire to eat at it again until we are back in America, it just leaves too much to be desired.

Luciana wanted to get pizza because there was a local pizza place across the street from the Subway but we promised to look for frozen pizza for her and she reluctantly agreed that that would be good enough.

The grocery shopping trip took easily an hour or more, much longer than it should have.  The grocery store, which is miraculously 24×7, was not huge but it was a full sized store and not some little thing like we are used to from Spain.  This was like a small American grocery store, more or less, but the prices were a bit high compared to the US.

One really neat thing was that they had tiny grocery carts just the right size for the girls to use.  So each of them got one and they got to grocery shop along with us, which was awesome except for the fact that they were out of control and rambunctious and we can probably never do that again.  It was pretty handy that they had carts of their own, though, because we ended up filling up the main adult cart and both of the girls’ carts to nearly overflowing. So we needed the extra cart capacity.

We got a lot of groceries.  Tons of them.  Pretty much all staples.  Bread, milk, fruit, veggies, cereal, yoghurt, butter, cheese and so forth.  Just lots of it.  We want a lot of it to come close to lasting us for a month.  Coming back and shopping is not going to be an easy thing to do.

Overall there was not that much really interesting as far as food went.  Soursop yoghurt was unusual and we got some to try it out.  The little grocery store had four different kinds of limes which was pretty surprising.  Even a giant grocery store would not have a selection like that in the US.  There was passionflower fruit which you never see in the US.  Other than that, the grocery store was tame.  No frozen pizzas though, Ciana will not be happy.  Even the bread is Bimbo like back home, although here they have an amazingly delicious butter bread from Bimbo that is way better than their generic bread that we normally get.  We ended up spending almost five hundred dollars on groceries just today plus a tiny bit yesterday too.  Not cheap.

We did get a bottle of Panamanian rum and some local beer, Panama Light, but nearly all of the groceries were actual food.  I was pretty amazed to find that Johnny Walker Blue, Platinum, Gold and Swing were all out on the open shelves at the grocery store here.  In the US Johnny Walker Blue would always be in a locked cabinet.  Must be a lot more affluent here and less theft than back in the US.

After grocery shopping we hit the telebanco to get cash.  Officially Panamá uses the Balbao but it is locked to the US dollar and all of the cash that we have seen is American which is super convenient for us but it keeps the cost of things really high, which is unfortunate for travelers.

Our TMobile cellular service is working great out here.  We really have no dead spots.  We are getting both text and data service all over the country, even way out in the middle of nowhere.

It was the middle of the afternoon when we finished with the grocery shopping and drove back out to Playa Blanca.

We relaxed for a while just checking out the balcony and the views of the ocean and eventually we discovered that we could see the mountains through the haze to the north, they are huge.

This evening, before the sun went down, we took the girls down to the pool that they can see from their bedroom balcony and we went swimming for a few hours.  We got in at least an hour of swimming, maybe two.  After sitting out for a little while with Dominica I got into the pool to swim with the girls.  It is a nice pool here.  All pretty shallow, I can stand up anywhere.  Good size and very few people using it.  Maybe a dozen people at most while we were there.

It was dark when we got back up to the condo and got the kids off to bed.

Dominica and I got exactly zero sleep last night.  We tried “going to bed” sometime around a quarter before two with an alarm set for three (a couple of alarms at least) but between needing to do things that we forgot and there being so little time before the alarms were expected to go off we might have pulled off ten minutes, if that, of sleep which is quite a bit worse than getting none at all.  This is going to be one incredibly rough day for us.

The alarms went off at three so we got out of bed and started getting everything to the door and the kids up.  Liesl was crying, she was so tired.  She did not want to stand up at all.  We had eleven suitcases and bags to get down to the living room to be ready for when Bennie would arrive to pick us up.  We are very thankful that we do not need to drive ourselves this morning, that would be just one more thing to deal with while exhausted.

Bennie was there just before three thirty.  We threw everything in the back of the pickup and got the girls into the back seat.  There was no traffic at all, although there was a big of construction, going up to Bush Intercontinental on the north side of the city.  It is actually rather a long drive to get there, even without any traffic.

Once in the airport we had no problems getting checked right in.  AeroMexico did a good job in the airport.  This is our first time flying internationally from Bush Intercontinental and we were in terminal D which was completely closed while we were there.  Not even vending machines selling bottled water.  Nothing.  Not the best way to have it set up.  Not a single thing opened before it was time for our flight either.

We needed a little something so Dominica went on a really long walk to terminal E and managed to get some coffee for me and some pretzels for the girls.

Our first flight was on time.  We were in the second to last row and had it all to ourselves which was really nice.  It was a small plane, just two seats on either side.  Luciana and I sat on the right hand side and Liesl sat with Dominica on the left.  The plane was great with tons and tons of luggage space so we had no issues at all with all of our bulky stuff which is pretty rough in most situations.

Most everyone slept during the short flight from Houston to Mexico City.  It was a very easy flight.  It even arrived twenty minutes early.  The flight into Mexico City was really cool with us able to really see the mountain ranges and even a volcano.

Once in Mexico we had to disembark from our plane, get our luggage, get stamped into the country and go through customs, then rush to our gate.  It was a little hectic but worked really well.  The airport in Mexico City is great.  Modern, clear and efficient and everyone was really friendly.  Also very handy that Mexico City is not at all a tourist airport but all about business.  Mexico City is not a major tourist destination.

We got to our gate and had about twenty minutes to sit and relax as the flight to Panama City was slightly delayed.  Not much, just a quarter of an hour or so.

The flight from Mexico City to Panama City was a little longer than the first leg and Liesl did not sleep on this trip.  Dominica was sitting in her usual spot on the aisle across from us and I was between the two girls.  Luciana slept much of the way on this leg.

We arrived in Panama City at around two in the afternoon.  It was a wave of heat stepping off of the airplane.  This is a very hot country.  The descent into Panama City Airport was very cool.  Liesl and I were watching out of the left side window and got to see the mountains and then the canal cutting through the jungle, then the city as the plane flew out over the Pacific to get the approach right and a great view of the ships coming in and out of the canal and of downtown and then into the airport.  What a gorgeous city.

We landed, got our bags and got through immigration without too much trouble.  The lines were not bad.  Not nearly as much was available in English as we had thought that there would be.

After getting out of customs we had to figure out what to do about our rental car.  This turned into rather a significant disaster.

Our rental agency was not at the airport.  Dominica checked the paperwork that she had from Expedia and it said that a shuttle would be there to pick us up.  We looked and waited and I ran all over the airport trying to figure this out and there was definitely no shuttle from this rental agency called NÜ Cars.

We tried calling the number for the car rental place and that did not work either (later I figured out that the number was modified by Expedia to resemble an American number complete with country code incorrectly added on to it) so we had no way to contact the rental place and no reason to believe that it even existed as it was not at the airport, had no shuttle and the number provided said that it was not accepting calls.

I ran over to another rental place, Sixt, and asked for help with the phone number assuming that they could not get through either and that we would just rent from them.  They called and managed to get a hold of NÜ since they knew how to modify the given phone number to make sense in Panama.

From their call, there was no question that they did not have a shuttle coming to get us and we were going to have been abandoned there for forever had we followed the directions from Expedia (which also made it clear that there was no reason for us to need to contact the rental company as everything was confirmed – the statement that we did not need to call them was written right on the paperwork!)  We were told that the shuttle would be there in fifteen to twenty minutes to get us and to just wait outside (in the 94 degree heat and humidity so thick that there was water running off of everything.)

We stood outside with a luggage cart and everyone sweating for about forty minutes or longer.  Eventually a guy came up to us with a sign with my name on it.  There was no shuttle, just the tiny car that we had rented that had only barely enough space for us and our luggage and the guy had driven it to pick us up and take us to the rental place.  Luckily this actually worked but it was dangerous and ridiculous and came super close to not working at all.  The trunk was completely full, Dominica and the girls were smooshed in the back and were holding luggage and I was in the front seat so tight that my knees were crushed and I was not safe at all.

The ride to the rental place took at least forty five minutes.  It was insane.  We had to drive all the way from the airport to the far side of the city!

Once we got to the rental car place and were nearly an hour from the airport and had no idea where we were (and this was barely a real business to, it was a shack in the middle of the city with a dusty little lot with a few beat up cars) they tried to hit us with a Gringo tax of 300% what we had agreed to pay for the car.  This was not cool.  Calling Expedia was of no help.  We had tried to reach them earlier about there not being any rental car like they are promised us and their wait time was nearly two hours!  A little too long given the nature of their business.

We were at the rental place probably for an hour either arguing with the people inside or arguing with Expedia.  It was horrible.  Expedia was lying through their teeth trying to get our money and actively conflicting with the information from the rental place in an attempt to extort us.  Thank goodness while this was going on Dominica had reached out to the rental people who had the keys and they had met us at this rental place to drop off the keys for us.

They are local Panamanians and were able to give us options and help us figure out what to do.  We were physically trapped and held hostage – no way to move our stuff or the kids without the rental car, they had figured out to drive us somewhere where we had no choice but to pay anything that they demanded of us.  We’ll know to look out for this particular scam in the future.  We warned that Expedia actively participates in it and sets people up for it.

The rental people actually put us in their car and drove us to a National Car rental place that was about five minutes away.  Thank goodness for well known brands.  We managed to rent a good car, rather than the crappy, old beat up Nissan we were going to get from the other place, at a decent price with drop off right by our resort.  This really changes our plans for this whole month, but at least we did not get scammed.

While we were renting the car the US versus Panama soccer match was on.  A cop at the rental place realized I was an American and was making fun of me while I was there.

After we got the car rented we were ready to get on the road, finally.  It was five thirty.  Originally our plan was to have gotten to our resort no later than six.  Talk about our plans being messed up.

The drive out west to Rio Hato took much longer than we were guessing that it would but the drive was interesting.  We got to cross the very famous bridge over the Panama Canal which was very cool.  It is amazing how Panama City is one of the densest, most vertical cities I have ever seen and how, the instant you cross the bridge, you go from solid high rises to trees and nothingness.

The drive west is a slow go with slightly crazy drivers.  Nothing too bad but you know that you are not in the US or Europe, very different driving from either of those places.

After more than an hour of driving we found the town of Coronado which I had seen on a YouTube show in December.  This is a town famous for catering to Americans and being full of American restaurants and places to buy American products.  We had heard good things about the grocery store here, the Rey, and we were looking for some food so we stopped there as there was really nothing but a few McDonald’s to stop at along the way without stopping at a truly traditional open air Central American shack restaurant – which is probably quite good but we have no idea what to expect and are not about to do that today.

We tried to eat at the McDonald’s but they sell nothing but meat here.  So that didn’t work.  I went into the grocery store and got us some basic supplies to make sure that we are good for a day or two.  Then I ran into the Subway and got us subs to go.  Then back on the road.

From Coronado it was about another half an hour to Rio Hato and the Playa Blanca Resort.  We were able to find it without any problem.  Although the signage was a little hard to follow and at the last second it was like “oh THIS is the turn” and the moment that that happened, in the darkness, it turned out that a herd of cattle was crossing the road.  Had we not been turning into the resort we would have gone right into the side of twenty cows!!! We are certain we would have had a horrendous car accident had that not been our turn right that second.  As it was we were feet from the cows in the darkness.  They were everywhere blocking the highway – the biggest highway in the country with a posted speed limit of 100kph.  People could hit that cattle really fast and have no idea that something was in the road.  There are no lights.

We got into the condo without any problem.  We have our own parking spot, the keys worked, we had no issues at the gate; it was all very simple.  We unloaded all of the luggage and got into the apartment.  It’s a really nice place.  Lots of space, two separate suites one for the girls and one for us.  Big open living space.  Nice balcony.  It is dark but I think that we have ocean views too.

It gets dark very “early” here because it is almost at the equator and at the height of summer the days are only barely longer than twelve hours.  It’s weird.  And the day ends early because we are on Central American Time which is locked to Central Time in the US, but longitudinally we are so far east that we are directly under Rochester, NY.  So the sun sets nearly an hour shifted, here.

We were exhausted.  We did not go outside or do anything.  Pretty much we were all straight off to bed once we had gotten online and made sure that the Internet was working and everything.  Tomorrow we need to go grocery shopping for real and stock up on stuff.  We only have the rental car until Monday midday so we are going to be, more or less, stranded out here without a car most of the time.  That is going to make a lot of things very logistically difficult.