Life on the farm

I’ve realized that I have done a really bad job lately keeping up with new posts. I don’t know what’s going on in our life other than it sure seems like we get busier and busier every day! Holy Cow!! But I’ve decided that I’m going to try harder to post more often and for today’s post I’ve added just some random pictures of Panama that wasn’t in any earlier posts. I’m not sure if you want to see a couple more, but these showed some of the other things that we did.

From spending time on the beach

to seeing elaborate carvings at the buffet

we enjoyed watching quite a few shows at our hotel

and sitting on our patio 

we laughed when we saw this one lonely plate for dieters 

and had the perfect pedicure to match the sky

soon we knew our days were numbered

and we had to say good-bye to the warm tropical weather

but when we were on the plane and the sunrise now was on the back side of the wing, we knew it was just a matter of time when we would be back to our daily responsibility and this trip would just be a great memory that we all had! 

When we left our hotel this morning we had a chance to stop at one of the local stands on the side of the road to pick up our fruit for the lunch at the tribe. This was a new experience for me and the fruit looked and smelled just wonderful. We spent some time with our guide picking out what everyone liked and then with our bags full, we were off for the day.

So we just came from the waterfall and as our boats pulled up to the bank by the river, we took off our life jackets and was greeted by members of the Embera Tribe that we were visiting. This tribe is a local tribe that lives on the bank of the river and welcomes visitors to their village. The clothes and the people were beautiful and when we were walking up the path to the main hut we could hear dancing in one of the huts somewhere on the hill.

So now that we were at the village, we found out that each family in the tribe had a table that was filled with their items to sell and I’m just saying it was hard to figure out just what I should buy, everything was made just beautiful. I decided on a really cool woven bowl and for now it’s sitting on our fireplace mantel in our house. I’m not sure what I’ll put in it, but it still is pretty awesome and a great remembrance. 

After a talk from the mayor (?) of the tribe with help from our tour guide as a translator for us,  our meal was delivered by some girls from the village.  The first thing was a couple of fruit plates from the fruit that we had picked up at the beginning of the day. They took it and it was all cleaned and prepared for us. Our guide said he purposely picks up extra fruit to share the leftovers with the tribe. And with only 7 people in our group I’m thinking that we for sure was going to have leftovers!  Then to continue our lunch we were handed some palm leaves with fish and plantains in it. We were told that they eat a lot of fish that they catch right from the river and I guess you couldn’t have a fresher meal than we got. Below are some pictures of where they prepare the food. We were told that they got buy with little at this tribe and after you look at the pictures below you would agree. 

The kitchen

Cooking the fish

After our meal it was time to watch the women and girls dancing their traditional dances along with the men playing the music. Then all of a sudden they started to invite us all to dance and soon we were dancing in a hut with the local tribe in the Panamanian jungle. Cool.

After our dancing was done and we did a little more shopping, we headed back to our canoe and eventually made it back up the river to our travel van. What a fantastic experience!

With all the scare of the Zika virus going around and it being that we were in Central America and all, we hesitated when we were trying to decide if we were going to take a pirogua canoe up the river in the jungle in Panama. But heck, you only live once right? So we booked the excursion and we did a double check of our bug sprays and we were set. 

The day of the trip started with an early pick up at our hotel with our bags filled with cameras, bug spray, and of course our cameras. Yup, we were ready. So we found our guide and once we were loaded on the bus we found ourselves still waiting for something. You know when you sit on a bus and not sure why you are waiting, but you just know that you have to wait? Yeah, it was one of those times. But finally our guide came back on the bus and said that he had tried to call the other 6 people joining us and couldn’t get in touch with them. And since we waited for 15 minutes of them to show up – well we were going. I’m guessing they’re going to be pretty mad when they remembered they had bought their tickets for this day! Yikes! But for us? Well we all had our own seats and  well so far the trip was looking pretty good.

First thing to do on our jungle ride? Well to get our boat. We were going upstream to a waterfall and had to make our way through the waters of the Charges River. See this river is the main water source of the Gutan Lake that feeds the Panama Canal. And if you remember that I wrote that there are crocodiles in the Panama Canal – well guess where they’re coming from? You guessed it , rivers like this. We were kinda confused when we saw a local family washing their clothes on the bank of this river and the kids were also swimming in the river. Now if there are crocodiles in the river just why in the world would you want to do this? Our guide said that with the water being so low this time of the year, the fish and wildlife move to more secluded areas and so do the crocodiles. Now seriously this is a good thing to know for this family today! 

As we made our way up the river there were a lot of birds flying overhead and every once in awhile I could see fish jump in the water. The water was kinda dirty looking, but after the first time that we got stuck going upstream, hey I was just glad that there was water! The boat that we took was called a piragua. This is a dug out tree made into a boat and it took me quite awhile to get used to it. With 9 of us in it, it did make me a little nervous. But then I realized that if one of our boat travelers was BLIND and didn’t mind it, I couldn’t be such a chicken and actually let loose of the sides after we got going for awhile. 

Our ride up the river through the rain forest jungle was around an hour and then we slowly started to mover toward the land. We were going to hike through the rain forest to visit a waterfall. But before we got to the waterfall we found ourselves going over some pretty fancy bridges (not so much!) and followed a hiking path through the woods. A couple of times we went through the water and rocks, and I was just glad that no one fell. Not here is where you should be asking yourselves “did I miss the part where they put the bug spray on?” Well we ended up never putting it on. Yup, pure confession time. But to our defense, our guide said that the mosquitoes were only out in the early morning and late afternoon, and since it was around noon and with 100% humidity and 100 + degrees – well we should be safe. So I ended up carrying this bag with not just one but TWO bottles of bug spray and never used it. And I guess he was right, we never did get a mosquito bite on our hike. Hooray! 

We finally made it to the waterfall and it was awesome! I found an old water camera before we left that I had from about 10 years ago and had taken a couple of pictures in the waterfall. I just can’t wait to develop the pictures. The reason that I say this is because when Daryl and I were sitting under the waterfall and with what should be a pretty good photo, a lady came up and was photo bombing it. No – – she wasn’t just photo bombing it, she climbed up and sat right with us. So weird. And with no signs that she was going to move, she is now part of our picture. If the pictures turn out, I’ll have to share them with you, but I’m just warning you they are going to look pretty bad I’m sure.

Well after a good swim and our photo op’s with our new friend,  we were back on the pirogua and headed to the Embera Tribe down river for a meal that the tribes made and some dancing. It was really fun going on this hike and I’m guessing the tribe visit and food is going to be another adventure! 

Now the Panama Canal is such an awesome place I know just right from the beginning that I won’t do it justice in this post. But here I go with my best attempt.

We picked this year’s vacation because we’ve talked about going to the Panama Canal a couple of years ago when we were in Costa Rica but just could’t make it work that time. But this year we planned our vacation around visiting the canal. Seriously how awesome is that?

The booking of the canal trip started  when we sat down with a travel agent in our hotel. We got the advice on this hotel group from our airport driver and we were glad that we cancelled our first booking that we did on the internet and choose this group instead.

So we started out the morning getting picked up at our hotel and headed to our boat for the day. The trip was going to take us a good 2 hours to get to our destination and when we got stuck in traffic with people driving literally in all the lanes (both the ones that you should be driving in and the ones that you shouldn’t be driving in!) all of a sudden we got nervous that we wouldn’t make it to the boat in time. Seriously! When we asked our tour guide what would happen if we were late she said haven’t you ever heard of ‘missing the boat’? Yeah, the bus got a little quite at that point because, well because we all probably had heard that saying before!  But soon we turned off the main highway and was making good time again in traffic. We found ourselves stopping just as we got to the river and when were getting off to stretch our legs, all of a sudden our tour guide comes back and said for us to hurry and get back on the bus – the boat was waiting. Holy Smokes! So we hurried back to our seats and then on to the boat we go. There was sure a lot of people on the boat when we got there and in the course of the next 30 minutes it was full. It really looked like to me a big boat with a lot of people on it, but that was sure not the case when we were up against the freight carriers in the canal later.

Once we started down the canal we saw a lot of different  birds and seagulls along the way and even though they said that there are crocodiles in the river, we never did see any of them. But as we made our way down the canal and headed into the first locks . There was a very HUGE ship that we were being paired up and now our boat wasn’t looking just so big anymore. Now this is where the awesome part comes in. We were in the Panama Canal going through the locks. We started watching our boat going through the locks in the front of the boat and ended up in the back  with the suggestion of Daryl and my brother. What a good idea that was because we could see the gates coming to a close right before our eyes.There are two sets of gates together just in case one fails and they didn’t want to drain the lake that feeds the water to the canal. But the gates don’t close completely and the force of the water pushes them together to have them sealed.

We ended up going through 2 locks and under a couple of bridges. One was the Bridge of Americas and the other was the Centennial Bridge Panama.

We did run into a problem though that I have to tell you about. We had a guy that was what I would call a bully on our boat. He was probably around his mid 70’s and started to pick a fight with another person while on the boat. Well they ended up just yelling at each other and that was that. Then this same guy started to pick a fight with someone else and things got bad. They ended up pushing each other and there was concern that the bully was going to push the other guy overboard into the canal. OK, seriously? Well later on in the trip we found out from a tour guide that the pilot of the ship (you have to have a representative on board from the canal with your boat captain) asked our boat captain if this ever happened before and he was told never! The pilot said that he wouldn’t do anything about it unless this guy kept it up. See the pilot had said that this guy who was picking fights had put the security of the Panama Canal in danger. Now what would that mean to this guy if he did call the local federal police? Well it would mean a fine and most likely the bully would have to spend the rest of his life in jail in Panama. Crazy!

I guess you learn something new all the time. And this time it’s to never pick a fight when you’re on the Panama Canal! 

After our canal trip and while we were headed back to our hotel, we laughed at this bridge so hard until we thought about just what exactly we were seeing and then we got a little nervous. What we were looking at was the bridge that we were crossing with our tour van would flip the wooden planks up when we would drive over them because they were loose.Now I don’t know if someone stole the nails or something out of these boards, but even I knew that this was something that you don’t … and probably shouldn’t see every day.

So here are some pictures of the canal that I took. You’re kinda lucky, I’m  only sharing a few – I do have a LOT more 🙂

Panama City

And would I recommend this trip to you? Absolutely – I mean it is the 8th Wonder of the World you know. It took 250,000 people to build it and we were up close and personal with 5,000,000 ton vessels rise and drop 50 feet in front of us. 

and we even were able to see the new addition to the canal that they were building. 

Yeah, pretty cool.

Wow! Where to start? We had a such a fantastic vacation and all our travels went so well, yup life if good! Because I always take so many pictures (shock right?), I decided to brake down our travels by categories for the blog posts. That way I can kinda spread the pictures out so you won’t get too overloaded. 

So first things first. Getting ready. It’s always nice to go with another couple because you can talk about what you should and shouldn’t bring. Since we were headed to Panama in February, there was a couple of essential things we all needed to bring. # 1 Swimsuit – now this is a must! and I ended up bringing about 4 along just in case. Now just in case of what? Who knows, but I’ll be ready. # 2 bug spray. This has been become an important item for anyone traveling this year with the Zika virus going around and I know that we had a couple of spray cans of bug spray and I also had some essential oil concoction with us. While the others traveling with us had a bottle of bug spray that was almost all DEET. Yup, we were ready! And for the rest of the things to pack? Well that included summer dresses for the evenings, suntan lotion, and flip flops. We had this trip planned since last Fall so we all were really looking forward to it.

Our Trip: we headed to the cities the night before we left because our flight the next morning was leaving really early so we could get to Panama yet in the afternoon. We also knew that we were going to be pretty tired the next day – but heck who cares right? We’re on vacation! 

Morning sunrise while we were on the airplane

Everything went well with our flights which was a good thing, and soon we were standing in the airport looking for our hired transfer guy holding up a poster with our information on it. We found him in the crowd and with the weather around 90 to 95 degrees and a couple of locally made beers, seriously how could you go wrong ?On the way to the hotel we were able to drive over the Panama Canal and we were excited to have the chance in a couple of days to take an actual boat tour ride through it. It honestly seemed a little unreal if you asked me. And I knew just how lucky we were to be having this chance to do this. 

Seeing the Panama Canal on the way to our hotel

Here are some pictures of our hotel and our beach that I had taken to give you an idea of what we were calling home for the next 8 days. I tried to get out and get some pictures early before the crowds came. I think I’m going to like it here. 

Food and more food…

We’ve just spent the last 8 days in Panama and what a trip that was! We got back to our farm around 11:30 pm Thursday night and after a full day of work on Friday, I’m going to be busy today with laundry and just trying to catch up.

But I did take tons of pictures, so I’ll try to load some of them later this afternoon. As for now? Well my first load of laundry is done and with the sun just starting to come up, I think it looks like a great day to hang most of them outside.

Talk to you later this afternoon!