Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning Paul drove out to Playa Blanca around nine this morning to pick up the Miller family and drive us out to El Valle about forty to fifty minutes away to the north.  It was closer to ten when we finally made our way out of Playa Blanca and the drive up to El Valle took nearly an hour.

The mountain drive was beautiful but was way too much of a winding trip for Dominica and the girls, even with their motion sickness medication. We had to stop at an overlook along the way to get a minute outside of the car.  This has already ruled out El Valle as a long term location for us, we just would not be able to handle the driving in and out on a regular basis.

This was our first time off of the PanAmerican highway to get to really see Panamá and what real life is like as opposed to the highway businesses and the resort setups.  It was far more interesting than where we are living this month.

We got to Bob’s mother in law’s place and we were there for probably only about half an hour before we all set out for a walk across town to go out for lunch at an Italian place.  Bob truly underestimated the distance that was involved as it was probably a mile or more in the heat.  There was pretty much no shade the entire way.

About halfway there Bob was in rough shape and sent Paul back to get a car to come back for us.  It was just too far to walk.  So Paul headed back and Bob, Dominica and I continued on with the kids.  We did not go very far before I missed the sidewalk just a little bit and the sandal on my right foot did not hold well enough and the pressure of me slipping cause the sandal to spin on my foot and down I went.

Bob said that I can down so hard on the pavement that I bounced a little.  My left knee or very high shin hit quite hard but mostly I caught myself with my hands.  Nothing tragic but I hit hard enough that there was quite a scrape and a bit of blood going on.

We walked on a little ways and found a shady spot to sit and wait for Paul to arrive with the car.  It was a good thing that we had waited for him, it turned out to be rather a long ways yet to go at that point to get to the restaurant, DaVinci’s, which was way out to the east of town by the Rey’s grocery store.

Lunch turned out to be really amazing.  It was a very fancy Italian bistro with an extremely high end menu.  I got a smoked salmon in vodka sauce pasta dish which was amazing.  Both girls tried it to and they really liked it as well.  They would have eaten my entire meal had I let them.  Liesl got a really awesome mushroom soup but she declined to eat it.  Everything was awesome there.

We drove partway back and stopped at a little ice cream place halfway back so that the girls could get ice cream.  Bob and I both got rum & raisin ice cream.  Dominica actually got a grape nut ice cream which was really odd, but pretty good.  Luciana got strawberry, of course.  Liesl got vanilla with sprinkles.

We went back to the house and spent the afternoon there.  Such a peaceful location.  We got a lot done.  Before dinner Paul and I took a walk through the area north of the house which was neat to get to see the backroads and what was out there.

Dinner was amazing.  A Panamanian fish in a cream sauce.  So good.

Dominica and Bob both went to bed early.  Paul and I went out to explore down and find a bar.  We started first going to a hostel on the east side of town and ended up going out with four of the people who were staying there.

We just went to the Balboa bar right across the street.  This was my first time in a Central American bar but it was pretty much exactly as I had imagined it.  Big, dark and mostly empty.  Nothing like what you would find in the US.  It was basically a converted barn.

We had a really good time, bought a few rounds for the house and got a party started.  We didn’t stay late, maybe ten thirty at the latest.  Sampled some local beer like Balboa and Atlas.

We went back to the house where Bob was awake.  We had a few more beers there and were up probably until about one in the morning.

Luciana got into a lot of trouble tonight.  Dominica had fallen asleep around eight thirty, which is surprisingly easy to do in a place that gets dark around seven, and at some point after she was asleep Luciana attempted to sneak a box of cereal in the dark and spilled it all over.

We slept in a cottage near the main house.  No air conditioning but the evening air was not too bad here in the valley.

We had a nice, relaxing morning today.  This is our first real weekend here in Panamá and so we got to sleep in and do almost nothing all morning.  We did a little cleaning but mostly did nothing.  We have been doing a little bit of research about where we are going to be going in the fall and Dominica and I have decided that we are going to hold off on our next trip to Europe because our next travel window is a relatively small one and the cost and effort of a trip over the pond will be too much for too little time there.  So instead we are planning to go to Nicaragua.

We have a few properties in Nicaragua that we are interested in. Mostly we are looking around the small city of Granada, which is also the oldest European city in the new world.

Bob and Paul drove out from Panama City this morning and went first to El Valle to have lunch.  So it was late afternoon, by the time that they had fought traffic all morning, had lunch and then did the drive down to Playa Blanca, by the time that they had gotten here.  They have a white, rented Toyota Yaris hatchback that, other than being a hatchback, was identical to the one that we had rented last weekend.

We spent a few hours out on the balcony talking and enjoying the ocean breeze.  Then they drove me out to Coronado to go to the Rey grocery store there as our food situation was getting pretty tough here at the condo.  We ended up shopping for an hour and buying nearly four hundred dollars in additional groceries – much of it in frozen food that will hopefully last us for a while.

It was a big shopping trip but I got a lot of really necessary stuff.  We are in much better shape to be “trapped” in our home in Playa Blanca now.  Tons of frozen fish and veggies.  Overall we are going to be eating very healthy this month because we truly have no other choices!

After getting back to the condo the guys dropped me off and then set out to drive back to El Valle.  We will see them again tomorrow morning when Paul comes back by himself to pick us all up so that we can spend the weekend up in the mountains.

This year is flying by, no question.  Already the end of July and the end of our first week out of our five that we are spending here in Panama!  How did we get to our seventh day so quickly.  It feels like we just got here, but we really did arrive on Saturday and it is already Friday.  That is just crazy.

We had had a slower day today.  Paul and Bob are going to El Valle today and we will see them tomorrow, we think.  Today is just a normal work day for us with nothing going on. In the morning Dominica took the girls down to the pool and they went swimming for a while, but it was pretty hot and the girls did not want to swim for all that long.

Liesl and Dominica worked on school today.  I had plenty of work to do so was focused on that.

This evening Dominica and I watched some Love Boat and kicked around the idea of ordering in some pizza but the effort to do so was enough to keep us from actually attempting to do it.

Our first Thursday in Panama.  Things are still going well.  The idea that we are still stranded here in the house has set in a bit.  We cannot really go out and go anywhere, not that we had had any plans to previously, but lacking the option is a bit limiting and the relative inability to do more or less normal things like go to a restaurant might wind up being annoying after some time.  This forced isolation is good for relaxing, though, and it is also good for our diets as there is really nothing to do except to eat the healthy food that we bought at the grocery store already and to eat it only in limited quantities because if we are not careful we will run out of it very quickly.  At this point we are more than halfway through all of our cereal already and almost two thirds of the way through our milk and we have made quite the dent in our first bag of Panamanian coffee.  The girls are rapidly depleting us of all of their favourite foods like white string cheese.  And they pick and choose things like just certain yoghurts which we are already out of.  For some reason the girls have been eating voraciously and we are going through their food items at a reckless pace.

It was overcast and mostly windy today.  I have been sitting way too much for way too long and decided to spend the day standing and working in the kitchen instead of going outside.  It is really loud outside too with the air conditioning units right there on the balcony.  When they are running, which is pretty much all of the time, it gets really loud.

Not much to say about today.  Still no rain came.  I did go outside to take out the trash, our first time doing that, and I felt a drop or two, like drizzly drops, while doing so but no actual raid or even a noticeable drizzle ever actually happened which continues to be a disappointment.  I love the rain in general and have been looking forward to experiencing the winter or rainy season here in Panama.  We can see rain happening all around us all of the time but right where we are gets bypassed time and again.

Paul and Bob flew in from the States today arriving in Panama City this evening.  They are spending tonight and tomorrow in Panama City and will be out here in Playa Blanca come Saturday morning.  I believe that we are heading up to El Valle at that point but am not sure of the plans.  It is going to be a busy week.

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.