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Going with the flow

Sorry, no photos today. This computer won´t accept my SD card. It also has a sticky shift key so please forgive any bad grammar.

We left Boquete on Thursday morning and went down to David so that we could go to a professional baseball game. A playoff game at at that. It was very hot in David and it is a larger city so I left the three of them at a restaurant and went looking for a hostel. The first two places I went were booked but I finally found a good room at Hotel Iris just off the square. Double bed and two twins, air-con, and a hot shower. That´s as good as it gets.

The person at the front desk said we should get baseball tickets early so Tate and I took a cab over to the stadium around 3pm. We certainly got a lot of stares.  I bought four tickets and a team t-shirt for Steve and spent $18. About an hour after we got back to the room I went out for some food and the most forceful rain I have seen in a long time started.  It must have rained four inches in less than an hour. The streets were flooded. We worried there wouldn´t be a baseball game. Not to fear, this is Central America, of course they still played!

We got there about 6:30 and the place was packed. I did not expect that! People are always late here! We had to sit in the outfield bleachers. The crowd was loud and they waved flags and sang songs. Many people had these awful air-horns that they blew all the time. The game had to be stopped twice because an iguana ran out on the field. We ate four meat-on-a-stick (very good), platanitas, two beers (kinda warm) and three chicken hamborguesas for $6.50. We left around the top of the 6th inning because it was 10:30pm  Back at the hotel we turned the game on the TV and at one point we saw our friend Andrew on TV. He´s the one that told us about the game.

The next morning we got an early bus to the Lost and Found lodge in the cloud forest. The website said it was a 15 minute walk from the road but they didn´t say it was all uphill on a rocky, steep path. The lodge also was built on a hillside so there were steep, rock steps to go between all of the buildings. This was very bad for Steve. I´m really surprised he did as well as he did.

We were in the dorm room there and the room was three beds high and three wide and each bed was a king. We slept two to a bed. I think there were 15 people sleeping in that room last night. It was nice and toasty with all those warm bodies.

The main attraction to this place were the animals. We saw lots of monkeys, a lemur, and a kinkaju. The kinkaju was a rescue animal so was tame. We got to pet and hold him. No pictures though. They are nocturnal and flash photography is bad for their eyes. Cora loved playing with Rocky.

The other draw here is hiking in the cloud forest. Obviously Steve couldn´t and Tate didn´t want to so Cora and I set out on a hiking scavenger hunt the lodge owners created. We had clues that lead us to places where we got the next clue. The deal was, this was HARD hiking. The path went up a mountain and then down the other side. Then we had to turn around and do it all again to get back. At one point Cora and I just started laughing at the situation we had gotten ourselves into. We were by ourselves in a Panamanian jungle, covered in mud, being rained on, and climbing hand over hand up steep grades. We did finish the hunt. It took us five hours and we were exhausted. The prize was a bottle of wine but they let us trade it in for two beers and a bag of M&Ms.

This morning we caught a bus for Bocas del Torro. All went well and we found a great hostel right away. We went to the beach this afternoon and hung out there for about three hours. We will probably have to leave for Costa Rica tomorrow, but hope our next hotel finds someone to take over our reservation so we can stay in Panama a bit longer. If not, we will go because we have to pay the full price of the hotel in Costa Rica.

We´ll let you know what happened soon...

Comments

I have the urge to edit your posts, just as payback! LOL. Your trip sounds awesome!
Anonymous said…
G-Ma wants to know what a kinkaju
looks like. Weather here is cloudy today, cooler and light rain today and Sunday. I went to
hit golf balls in the snow last Monday, (hit 100 balls at Perche Creek). Just about all the snow is gone except for the huge amounts in the parking lots. Church tomorrow, as I write this there is thunder going on outside.
G-Ma has changed the house decor to St. Patrick's Day. Cora will need to inspect as she normally does. Hard to believe that Tate did not desire to do the 5 hour
mud hike. Not really. Take care guys. G-Ma and the TGO

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