Back to Bocas

Wow, what a trip!

We should have returned to Bocas del Toro, Panama on Dec. 8th but I came down with another bout of vertigo. Not sure, but an old concussion might be the root cause of that recuring problem. However, airline travel seemed to only offer middle of the night red-eye flights or very expensive ones for us to rebook our travels. We chose late night.

Rental car from St. Pete to Orlando late afternoon on the 28th of Dec. then airport clearing in for a 9:40 pm departure went fine. The flight from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale was packed, including sniffling sneezing travelers and whiney or sugared up children. Lauderdale to Panama City, Panama went smoothly but both flights were late to depart but not a problem for us.....we were not going to get 'any' sleep. Baggage was slow to arrive, but eventually we were out the door...the last passengers only to find, no cabs. OK, here comes a pirate cab owner.
We accept his $33. price to drive us to the next airport across town.

Yikes! His car was one dent inside or atop another. The interior looked like a left over from demolition derby. He opened the hood and with a tucked away one liter coke bottle, topped up the radiator, then closed the hood/kind of.

He also drove like he was warming up for the demolition derby and after a near miss, I told him in my satisfactory Spanish, to slow down! He didn't like that but so what.

At Albrook Field, the puddle jumper airstrip, we then waited 3 hours for it to open and get us onto a small 20 passenger plane....with our luggage priced at $.80/lb. over 25 lbs. $40 bucks extra for the 50 lbs.

We arrived fine at Bocas, a 50 minute flight. Then because another plane landed too, we had to wait 50 minutes more for the workers to push our baggage 50 yds. over to us.

Tired of the slowdowns we opted to walk the 7 blocks or so from the airport to the waterfront toting our baggage behind on it's rollers. On the main street/waterfront, I stepped into a Chinese operated hardware store to purchace a phone card for airtime, then stepped aboard a small launch to take us 1/2 mile to our marina and Memory Rose.

No time was wasted. We quickly took the items in the suitcases, which were itemized and packed in large plastic food bags, and passed them aboard and below. The air conditioning was turned on and you know what followed??? about 2 days of catch up sleep.

Refreshed, life is good. Small projects getting done, meals being cooked and eaten, trips to town a fun adventure. We are smiling.