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Penn and Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 8

9/6/2016

My office. Hemmingway, eat your heart out.

Day Ten, Monday June 1st 2016

Today is my birthday. I’m not going to say anything more about that for now, but keep it in mind for later. We cool with that?

This morning we had to drop Wes and Joyce off at airport. They flew on Panama Air from Bocas to Panama City. They’ll stay the night in Panama City, then fly on to Orlando in the morning.
We left them at the airport around 11 am and headed back into town. (By back into town, I mean the three blocks or so to the shopping district. The airport in Boca is more convenient to “downtown” than even in San Diego.)

We hadn’t had breakfast and the day was marching on, so we decided to grab a bite and find an Internet connection before we did our shopping. Wes and Joyce took me to The Pub on the day I arrived and it had good Wi-Fi, so I went searching for The Pub.

I think I mentioned earlier that Wes gave me a tour, but I was so totally confused by streets without names and directions, that I couldn’t have found anything. Well, today was the proof.
It probably should have taken us five minutes to get from the airport to The Pub, it took more like half an hour. By the time I finally found the joint, Dawn and Heidi were so frustrated that they would have stopped anywhere. Fortunately, I’m one stubborn Papa.

The restaurant is in an old white two story house. The sign is designed to be spotted by those spy satellites that can read a newspaper in Moscow from a hundred miles up. A normal human being could not possibly find the two by four foot sign buried in all the other signs and behind bushes while driving by at twenty kilometers per hour. (That’s about twelve miles per hour folks.)

Anyway, at some point Dawn asked what the name of the place was. “The Pub,” I said.

“Oh, I thought you were just taking us to a pub.”

“Wait,” Heidi screamed, “we passed that a few minutes ago.”

I turned around and soon found our lunch spot.

We had lunch and worked the Internet for a couple of hours. It was soooo frustrating. The bandwidth was so narrow that it took from two to five minutes to open a web page. It was not this slow before, but I guess no one else was using the Internet that day.

After a couple of hours at The Pub, we took off on a shopping spree. I didn’t want to mess up Joyce’s food plans while they were there, but now it was our kitchen. I wanted to stock it with what we wanted to eat.

Looking back into the house from the deck

hit several stores and couldn’t find any edible vegetables. The veggies here look like they were removed from the shelves in a Mexican supermarket when they were too rotten for the Mexicans to buy. I’m serious. Just stepping inside a supermarket, you smell the scent of rotting vegetation. The cauliflower is black, the green beans brown.

We’ve been able to buy passable broccoli at the Super Gourmet, but that’s about it for fresh vegetables. Maybe I exaggerate. The potatoes, onions and garlic are pretty good too.

We could go to Super Gourmet and buy American brands, but you pay a premium for them. I
wanted to live like the natives, so we bought off-brand stuff in the local market.

The meat here is totally unappealing. The chicken in the butcher case looks diseased. The beef and pork looks like it was shipped from 1990. The one exception is the Super Market Isla Colon.

This store, like ALL the rest of the grocery stores on the island, is run by Chinese. Their meat counter has pretty good ground beef, if you buy the #1 hamburger. We buy the #2 for the dogs. They even have some half decent chicken.

Joyce has the freezer stocked with beef filets she orders from PriceSavers in David. They say
it’s the only edible steak available on the island. (For those of you who are just joining us, David is pronounced Dah-Veed. It is the nearest big city to Bocas, on the Pacific side of the isthmus. It is a forty-five minute ferry trip and a four hour cab ride from Bocas. You can fly there for about $100, an hour flight.)

It was hot and by the time we were through traipsing around all the grocery stores, we were beat. We climbed in the truck and picked our way home on the pothole highway.

This was our first night on our own. I knew that we’d be too tired and cranky to cook dinner, so I bought a roasted chicken at Super Gourmet. We sat down and looked at our food, too tired to eat.

A trip into town takes an entire day and you return too tired to care about anything.

The good news was that we moved from our broom closet of a room to the master suite.
Wes and Joyce’s bedroom is bigger than some houses. It has a bathroom, shower and sink attached. The entire building (remember, this is in a separate building) has a terracotta tiled deck around it. There is a walkway from the bathroom to the bedroom that has slatted teak walls to allow the breeze to flow through.

They have a custom made, teak king-sized bed. Why do they use so much teak here? It’s terribly expensive wood. Not here. The rainforest is filled with teak. There is a teak plantation on the road into town with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of teak trees. It is the most economical, and best, material to use.

Their bed is a giant four-poster. There are teak four by fours at each corner with two by four railing at the top. It is designed to hang mosquito netting from it. Wes and Joyce don’t have mosquito netting, but it still looks like something out of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
The cabinetry reminds us of the Victory. It is all teak and looks like the kind of cabinets you find in an expensive yacht.

I moved our bags into Wes and Joyce’s room but was too tired to even unpack. We flopped into bed and called it a day.

On the Road to Bocas

Day Eleven, Tuesday June 2nd 2016

Remember how I mentioned that yesterday was my birthday? Dawn remembered it today. I totally spaced out.

Usually, in the Wallace family, birthdays are a big deal. We call it the birthday season, because it normally lasts a week or so, but Katie (my oldest) has managed to stretch it out for more than a month on occasion. Of course, there’s the birthday dinner, with cake and presents on your birthday. But if it falls on a week day, we usually schedule a party for either the weekend before or after.

I hate stuff. I spent years trying to get stuff out of our house. Friend Susie kept giving the girls stuff that she no longer needed. We finally made a rule, for everything she gave the girls, she had to take something back.

Why do I tell you this? Because we discourage people giving us stuff for our birthdays. Instead, we ask that they give us memories. We ask for gift certificates for a nice restaurant, tickets to a ball game or the theater. Much better than having stuff hanging around the house.

Sometimes it can take weeks or even months (like ticket for a concert for play) to use them. That’s all part of the birthday season.

So you get the idea. Birthdays are a big deal.

So how in the hell could I forget my own birthday?

Dawn decided to make it a special day. We stayed around the house, I did a lot of reading, we went swimming in the ocean and took a couple of walks on the beach.

Dawn made us a nice dinner with one of the filets Joyce left in the freeze and a nice bottle of wine. No cakes, no birthday songs, no presents. I’m expecting a big celebration next year.
Since there wasn’t a lot going on, I’ll tell you a little bit more about the wild life.

Peanut takes on a snake

Since there wasn’t a lot going on, I’ll tell you a little bit more about the wild life.

It’s time to talk about the crabs. We have thousands of crabs around us. There are small white crabs that dig holes just above the tide mark on the beach. They are opaque when they’re small and turn a sandy color as they get older.

I mention these only because they are Little Bit’s favorite sport. (I’ll get around to telling you about Joyce’s dogs later. She has two, Little Bit and Peanut.) Bit loves to dig them out of the sand. They live in holes about two feet deep.

He sniffs a crab and starts digging. He’ll get down to where only his hind end protrudes from the hole, clouds of sand being thrown out between his legs.

Every so often, he stops and sniffs the sand, then he may change this course and dig in another direction as the crab moves underground.

Occasionally, he may actually dig one out. He flips it in the air. The crab hits the beach and takes off for the safety of the water. These little buggers are fast. It’s a hoot to watch them, small brown dog in pursuit, take off along the beach.

We also have land crabs. These guys live in holes they’ve dug in our yard. They’re all over the place. Some of the holes are an inch or two in diameter; some are large enough to trip in.

They come out mainly at night. A mature crab is about the size and color of our rock crabs in the Northwest, about four to six inches across the shell. I don’t know what they eat, but they’re nocturnal hunters.

I saw one the other night that really got my attention. While most of them are reddish-brown, this guy had a blue shell. I thought that the only blue crabs lived in the Chesapeake. At any rate, he was one of the larger crabs I’ve seen and very distinctive.

Next up on the list are snakes. So far we’ve see garter snakes slithering away into the bushes, baby boas and an emerald boa.

Cesar called us downstairs one afternoon to see the snake in our driveway sunning himself. He was a baby boa, about a foot or so long, brown with flecks of yellow in its scales. Boas are not poisonous, they use they’re firmly muscled bodies to strangle their prey. As babies, they eat mice and other small animals. When they are fully grown, they can eat a whole goat, but a foot long boa was no danger to us.

A couple of days later, Peanut was barking up a storm in the back yard. We went down to see what the commotion was all about. Peanut had cornered a baby boa about two feet long on the concrete pad where we hang our laundry to dry.

The snake was at least ten feet from the nearest cover. If it turned its back to run, Peanut would be on it in a second. The snake coiled and hissed at the dog. Peanut feigned a bite at the snake and it uncoiled and sprang towards Peanut in a flash. It was a dead standoff. (Should I call it a Panamanian Standoff?) The snake couldn’t escape and the dog couldn’t get it.

Peanut was making such a fuss that I decided to intervene. I grabbed a stick and tossed the snake into the yard where it could escape. Or so I thought.

These dogs are jungle dogs. Peanut’s reactions were so fast I would not have believed it. She was on the snake before it had a chance to coil. She grabbed the snake behind the head and started shaking it. She got a paw on its body and tore at its flesh.

It was over in an instant. Relying on her primitive instincts, Peanut had caught a tasty afternoon snack.

I know there are other species of snakes in the jungle, we just haven’t seen them yet. The local kids play in the jungle all day long, wearing only shorts, so I don’t think there’s much danger here. The poisonous snakes must live on the mainland.

It’s a long swim to the islands.

Dawn and Little Bit de-stressing

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Penn and Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 7

9/2/2016

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Bird Island

Day Eight, Saturday May 29th 2016

Today was our trip to Bird Island. The real name of the island is Swan Island, but all the gringos call it Bird Island because it is a national bird sanctuary.

Not that protecting any species really makes much difference here. The people who are concerned about the eco-system obey the laws. The natives don’t get it. They still catch and keep endangered species of fish, go out to the island and steal the birds’ eggs and raid the leatherback turtles’ nests.

As they said in Beauty and the Beast, “It’s a story as old as time.”

The natives have been depending on these species to sustain them since before the dawn of time. They know it is against the law, but they merely wait until there are no police around (Which is like ALL the time). There’s no one to stop them, so no risk of penalty.

What they can’t seem to realize is that these species are endangered and every turtle or bird they eat brings them that much closer to extinction. They have no concept of the past or the future. They live only for today.

Wes arranged for Enrique to take us to Bird Island on his boat. Enrique is the guy who used to maintain Wes’s boat before he sold it.

Enrique arrived promptly at 9 am at Playa del Drago (Dragon’s Beach) in his twenty-foot panga with a fifteen horsepower outboard. We took off our sandals and waded out to the boat, climbed aboard and were off.

First we cruised along the beach, taking in sights we couldn’t see from land. Long white beaches, tropical rain forest, pretty girls in bikinis, it’s gets a little boring after a while (but we haven’t been here that long yet).

Teak does grow on trees in Panama

We motored along Wes and Joyce’s beach. As usual, there wasn’t a soul around for miles.
At the house, we headed north, out to the island. It’s only a couple of miles off shore. What looks like a tiny piece of rock from their house grows into a magnificent little island spit up from the sea floor by some long dormant volcano.

It has sheer cliffs and must be two or three hundred feet high. Being made of volcanic stone, it is well eroded. On the seaward side of the island thousands of little holes are filled with birds’ nests. Each piece of the island is claimed by different species. Boobies live in one area, Frigattas in another. Thousands of birds fill the air or occupy the cliffs.

We made a circumnavigation of the island. On the landward side was a tiny beach. It is illegal for humans to go on the island, but this is where the poachers land. To the seaward side of the island is a large flat rock called, interestingly enough, Flat Rock.

The seas surge over the granite leaving it wet and slippery all the time. Okay, so we saw flat rock. It was no different than thousands of other rocks we’ve seen from the deck of a sailboat, but for some reason, the locals think it’s special.

After our excursion, we headed back to Isla Colon (remember, that’s Columbus Island) to do some snorkeling.

Enrique lives back in the mangrove swamps. He hadn’t brought the boarding ladder, so we had the opportunity to motor back into the swamps via a narrow channel.

I’ve never been in a mangrove swamp before. It was much as I’d imagined. Trees grow up out of the water. We didn’t see any water snakes or monkeys, but the smell was overwhelming. I don’t know how Enrique’s family can live amid the smell of rotting fish and animals, putrid vegetation and all varieties of waste.

Back at Enrigue’s house, there are a couple of docks and half a dozen boats. A flimsy wooden house is perched precariously on stilts up the hill a little. There are no beaches. That was fine with me. The water here is brackish and smells like sewage. I wouldn’t have gone in it to win a prize pig.

A wood fire burned in a pit outside the house. There a woman (probably Enrique’s wife) boiled a cauldron of water. She was doing laundry. She soaked the clothes in the hot soapy water, then pounded them on a flat rock until the water was gone. We didn’t see it, but I’m sure the next step was to hang them on a clothes-line of some sort. A couple of mostly naked boys played near the water’s edge. Life in the jungle.

All in all, it was a depressing little slice of life. I’m glad Enrique has a way to support his family, but I wouldn’t want to live like that.

With the swim step aboard, we headed out to the “coral reefs.” This was the most disappointing part of the day. Enrique anchored the boat in about four feet of water along the edge of the mangrove swamp. We put on our snorkeling gear and went over the side.

I immediately touched bottom, something I didn’t expect on a snorkeling adventure. I cleaned my mask, put it on and headed out in search of the “reef.”

What I found were a few coral heads on a sandy bottom. It was by no stretch of the imagination a reef.

Sure, in and around the coral heads we saw a few fish, a sea cucumber or two lay on the soft sand. Here and there an anemone clung to the young coral.

Wes had told me that Panama was one of the few places in the Caribbean that had growing coral reefs. The rest were drying up and dying. Well, that was true here. Maybe fifty colonies dotted the sandy bottom. Some were by themselves, some were in close proximity to others. When the tourists discover the islands and they become a tourist Mecca, about a hundred years from now, the coral might be worth snorkeling on. For now, find another reef.

Enough of the complaining. There are good snorkeling reefs here. We will visit them later.

Back in the boat, Enrique took us to Boca del Drago where we waded onto the beach, said our farewells and paid our guide. Wes gave him a twenty dollar bill.

Wes is known on the island as the Bank of Wes. Whenever the natives need a small loan, they come to Wes. He lends them the money, at no interest, and is not very aggressive about getting it back.

Enrique owes Wes sixty dollars. Wes expected to get twenty of it back. Enrique explained that he needed the Jackson to buy food and gasoline. Wes relented and paid up. Next time I need a loan, I’m going to the Bank of Wes.

We climbed into the truck, headed home, had dinner and flopped into bed exhausted.

After a long day of adventuring

Day Nine, Sunday May 30th 2016

Today nothing happened. Well, almost nothing. I drove into town to get gas for Cesar’s lawnmower. After that we sat around and read while Wes and Joyce packed.

It seems like a good time to talk about the wildlife (and no, I don’t mean at the local hotspots. That is if there WERE local hotspots.). I’m talking about the fauna.

We’ll skip the oceanic wildlife for now, because we haven’t seen enough to comment on yet. That leaves insects, arachnids, birds, reptiles and mammals. As far as I know, there are no amphibians here. (Are turtles reptiles or amphibians?)

I’ve already alluded to insects so let’s start there. Of course there are mosquitoes. They’ve been in the news quite a bit lately. Yes, they have had cases of the Zika Virus here. When people asked us if we weren’t afraid to go to a country where the Zika was running loose, Dawn answered them, “No. But we might come back with shrunken heads.”

Here’s the scientific facts. (Gimme the facts, ma’am, just the facts.) The virus is only a danger to women of childbearing age. It hardly affects the mother, for an adult the symptoms are like a very mild flu, but it devastates the baby. Babies exposed to the virus are born with tiny heads and shrunken brains.

It’s not a problem for us.

Now we come to ants. There are millions of ants in the rainforest. Everything from enormous fire ants to some so small you can hardly see them. We haven’t found any fire ants on the property yet, that doesn’t mean they aren’t here, but the tiny ones have a hell of a bite. From a tiny brown dot so small that you practically need a microscope to find it comes a bite that feels like you’ve been stuck with a hot poker. I was stunned by how painful it was. It burns for hours. I haven’t let any of those ants climb on me since.

Then there are the common garden variety ants. Of course we have them near and in the house, but when we walk through the jungle, we see hundreds of files of army ants carrying leaves back to the colony.

We have cockroaches, who doesn’t? However, in the jungle they’re everywhere. We’re fighting a constant battle to keep them out of the house. In addition to the ones you’re used to, there are giganto-sized roaches. They’re about two inches long. They come out at night, after the lights are out. When we sit and watch TV before going to bed, we see them.

Naturally, Heidi freaked out over them. One morning she and Dawn declared war on the roaches. It appeared that they (The roaches, not Dawn and Heidi.) were coming from under the stove. They took everything out of the drawers on the island and applied a liberal dose of bug spray. Behind the doors, under and behind the stove, behind the propane tank. Nothing was safe.

The giant roaches came pouring out by the dozens. Heidi screamed for me to get rid of them. Dawn just calmly washed all the drawers and everything that had been in them.

These monsters were done for. Some of them made it halfway into the dining room before they rolled over and died. I grabbed a broom, swept them up into a neat pile and swept them off the decks.

One night when I was getting ready for bed, there was a walking stick on top of the light. I didn’t think it was of any danger to us, but I picked it up and threw it out onto the lawn so it didn’t bother Dawn.

On another night I went to turn off my bedside light and was attacked. At first I thought the light was shorting out, it hurt so badly. Then I discovered it was an insect. I haven’t been able to figure out what kind of bug it was, but it was about three inches long with short, translucent wings. It had a stick-like body and what looked like a stinger on the aft end.

Needless to say, the bug declared war on me with its sneak attack. But like the Americans after Pearl Harbor, I finished the battle. I tracked the little bugger down and doused him liberally with bug spray. He flopped around for a couple of minutes, then was no more. I hurt for a couple of hours after that.

Some of our many banana spiders

Now come the spiders. I know they’re not insects, but I’m going to include them here anyway.

Both Heide and Dawn are afraid of spiders. If they see the tiniest spider, they yell for me to kill it.

I do not kill spiders. Spiders are our friends. They eat mosquitoes, flies and all sorts of other insects that bug us. In my house in Lynnwood, we had a pet spider one fall. He was a big wood spider and spun a web in our bay window. I wouldn’t let Connie get rid of him so we named him George and watched him grow.

Several weeks later we discovered an egg pouch. I guess he was a Georgina.
Anyway, when the lovely ladies discovered a spider, I gently picked it up and tossed it outside. No harm, no foul.

There are some interesting spiders in the rain forest. I’m going to talk about the big man-eating ones. Down by the cisterns, and all over the yard, is a species about six inches across with long, thin bodies and black and yellow stripped legs. They look very fragile. That is, I thought they had long, thin bodies. A couple of days ago, I started seeing ones with swelled up bodies. I suspect that these are females and are getting ready to lay eggs.

One night Dawn called me to get rid of a large hairy monster in the bathroom. It was easily six inches across, but was covered in brown hair and had thick, strong looking legs and a robust body. We call it a jumping spider because it can leap for three or four feet. Dawn is afraid that it will leap on her and bite her. It looked like a tarantula, but it was brown. I do believe that tarantulas are black. I hate to admit it, but I thought it might be poisonous, so I sprayed it and removed its little corpse.

These big boys are now dubbed “alien, gigantic man-eating spiders.”

Other than that, there are dozens of other kinds of spiders, mostly small. I see them all over the place, but we keep the house free of them.

I have one more thing to say about insects, then I will have bored you enough.

We have hordes of no see ums. What do they look like? I don’t know, you can’t see them. But they are wrecking havoc on our legs. Both Dawn and I have numerous red bumps on our legs where they bite. The bites itch for days. I’m told that after a couple of weeks, they don’t bites as much, my bite per square centimeter of leg surface has gone down, but they still bite.

My suggestion? Use lots and lots of deet. This noxious chemical is available in any number of mosquito sprays, Joyce has the house well stocked with Off!

That’s the insect story. I hope I haven’t bored you so much that you quit reading our adventures. I still have lots of wildlife to tell you about, but I think that’s all you can handle for one day.

Just one last word of caution: if insects really bother you, don’t go live in a rainforest.

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Penn and Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 6

8/5/2016

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Penn recovers at Juanie's Cafe

Day Seven, Friday May 28th 2016

I’ve told you we’re only steps from one of the prettiest beaches I’ve ever seen. For the first few days of my stay on Bocas, I swam every day. Today I took a pass.

I hurt so badly I didn’t want to get out of bed. I heard the voices in the main house and felt like they were having a party without me. I managed to get up and get dressed, then made my way onto the deck where everyone else was.

Dawn was not rested and still incredibly grumpy. She needed a long nap. Instead, she, her mom and Heidi hiked a mile or so down to the fresh water lagoon. The path to the lagoon starts just east of the house. It cuts through the jungle, then comes out on the beach. Where trees, rocks or promontories block the beach, the path once more winds through the jungle.

It’s a long walk, but the reward at the end is a spring fed river that forms a fresh-water lagoon just up from the beach. If you look real hard, you can see Dorothy Lamour wrapped in one of her sarongs on the Road to Bocas. (For those of you too young to catch the reference, too bad. No, really, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour made a series of “Road to . . .” movies back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. You don’t know who Bob Hope is? There’s no hope for you.)

I am told that the ladies went swimming in the lagoon. I didn’t see any bathing suits when they left so heaven knows what they wore. I would have liked to see that. On the other hand, they could have been wearing Mother Hubbards and I wouldn’t have known. I was so drugged up that I considered voting for Donald Trump. (Not really, but it sounded good.)

After the ladies returned, we piled into the truck and headed into town. I can tell you, it was not a pleasant drive for me.

The reason for our trip was that Wes and Joyce’s closest friends on the island and nearest neighbors (They’re about a mile west of us.) had a BBQ at their marina.

Courtney and Rosemary are a couple of good ol’ Texas hands. Courtney is a lifelong sailor who cruised these waters for years before dropping anchor in Bocas. He saw a need for a marina and built one. Every Friday, they have a BBQ and live music.

The marina is great. There’s room for about sixty boats or so. It’s nestled on a point across the bay from Bocas Town. There are no roads out there, so you have to take a boat. Fortunately, Rosemary sent a panga from the marina to pick us up.

The boats in Bocas lead a tough life, the docks more so. The panga was about twenty feet long with a high bow and low freeboard. Made of fiberglass, it had four seats molded into the hull.
Getting to boat on the dock was taking our lives into our own hands. The rickety, wooden dock was about two feet wide with no handrails. If you tripped or slipped, you were going swimming. I should mention that the water in Bocas Town looks a little suspicious. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that all of the town’s sewage is dumped into the bay.

We managed to board the boat with little incident and cruised across the bay to the marina.
The fare wasn’t bad. I had a combo of BBQ’d ribs and chicken. Dawn had the filet of beef. Heidi found a vegetarian pizza on the menu.

Miss Heidi checks out the marina

We got to know our neighbors a little. I immediately liked them. Courtney reminds me of the sheriff in an old western with a long, gray mustache and a dereliction for talking. He’s the strong silent type. When he does talk, his words roll slowly off of his tongue with a Texas accent.

Rosemary is the epitome of the farm wife in the same film. She’s as nurturing as can be and always willing to help with anything, but tough as rocks.

They are pioneers on the island. They were the first Anglos to move here. When they arrived there was no electricity and no running water. Bocas Town was a small settlement on a largely unpopulated island. They couldn’t call a cement truck to help build their house because there weren’t any. They mixed all of their cement in a wheel barrel by hand.

There was no road to this side of the island, so they had to haul in supplies by horse. For larger items, they landed them in pangas on the beach, then had to haul then up the hill on their backs.

I said that living here felt like living in the Old West. In their day, it really was.
Today we have it easy with solar panels and running water (rainwater caught and stored in a cistern). They really roughed it.

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Penn and Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 5

7/22/2016

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Miss Heidi at The Pub

Day Five, Wednesday May 26th 2016

Enter Hurricane Heidi.

Our busy days begin. Heidi, one of Dawn’s best friends from Florida, just happened to be in the Caribbean. She was on a two month break from Abu Dhabi where she lives with her husband, Tom. He is an ex-fighter pilot who now contracts his services to the government there. During Ramadan, Heidi says, the whole country just about shuts down. Most of the ex-pats there send their wives away for two months since there is nothing for them to do.

I think they just want a two month break from the little woman.

Heidi doesn’t fit the description of the little woman. She is Dutch born with a Dutch father and an Indonesian mother. She spent her early years in Indonesia, then her family moved to Germany where she completed her education.

She is blonde haired and blue eyed, stands about 5’ 10,” and has the figure of a Playboy model. She could be a starter on the Swedish Bikini Team (if any of you are old enough to remember those commercials). She speaks at least five languages and can debate you in any subject of conversation. Oh, yes, she is an expert in martial arts and a master of yoga. She posts pictures of herself in painfully contorted poses, lifting her body off the mat with one had. I wouldn’t mess with this broad.

Originally we planned for Dawn to come to Panama with me, then Heidi would show up five days later. As you know, that didn’t work. Heidi came on Wednesday and Dawn flew in the next day.

We (Wes, Joyce and I) arrived in town plenty early to pick Heidi up. We needed to do a little grocery shopping, but I wanted to wait until after Heidi arrived. Heidi is a herbivore and I felt that she needed a chance to stock up on whatever it is that veggies eat. After our stop at the “super-market,” we headed to the airport.

(I use the term “super-market” loosely. I don’t want you to think we were shopping in a Safeway. In Panama a super-market is what we would call a mom and pop grocery store. Then there are super-minis which are more like a 7-11.)

Heidi and Penn bend an elbow at The Pub

Wes and Joyce knew Heidi from their visits to Dawn in Florida. We watched the plane land and the people deplane.

There is only the slightest hint of security at the Bocas airport. The passengers climb down the staircase from the plane and walk across the tarmac to the little terminal. They walk into a small room where they wait for their baggage. There is only one “boarding gate” at the airport. No reason for two planes to be here at the same time.

I stood at the door and watched for Heidi to enter the room. There was no problem spotting her. This tall, blonde, Nordic goddess was surrounded by little brown people. The average Panamanian man must be about 5’ 4”, the women less than 5’. Heidi towered over everybody in the room. Her long blonde hair was put up in a bun, but there was no mistaking who she was.

She tore a muscle in her calf in Indiana. (I’m telling you, exercise is bad for your health!) It was mostly healed by now, but she still wore her immobilization boot. She couldn’t fit it in her suitcase.

We met with the requisite hugs, grabbed her luggage (No luggage carousels in Panama. They just slide the bags in through a small hole in the wall.) and climbed into Wes’s truck. Joyce took us to the Super Gourmet Market. There Heidi put in her supplies and I spent a surprisingly large amount of money ($60) on stuff that I wanted.

The Gourmet Market roasts chickens, so we picked one up for dinner. Unlike Costco, these are normal sized chickens. They come with half a chicken and roasted potatoes in one bag. We got two. That and a salad made an easy dinner.
Heidi let her moral high ground slip just a little and had some chicken with us.
Afterwards, we read a little, then headed for bed.

That’s when the hurricane struck. I was staying in the closet-sized guest room and Heidi got the loft with a queen-sized bed.

She turned in and climbed the ladder to the loft. All hell broke loose.

It seems that Miss Heidi is terrified of cockroaches and spiders. She, who has climbed the mountains in the Himalayas and sailed the fierce North Sea, was scared out of her mind at a tiny bug.

She immediately jumped back down the stairs and armed herself with bug spray and Off! You must understand that Heidi is a friend of the Earth. She won’t eat foods that have been genetically modified, been raised with chemical pesticides or throw away plastic bottles. Yet here she was, violating her dearest principles with unrestricted chemical anti-bug warfare.

She sprayed down her bedroom with so many chemicals that I could smell it in my room, with the door closed, on the first floor in an adjoining building.

My Kathleen Turner Arrives

Dawn was one tired puppy

Day Six, Thursday May 27th 2016

First thing this morning, I asked Heidi if she slept well. Big mistake. She spent the night keeping the world safe from insects.

It seems that she spent the night sitting on her bed with a flashlight in one hand and the bug spray in the other. Every few minutes, she’d turn on the light to check for bugs, then she’d bomb them. She didn’t sleep a wink.

Did I mention that we’re living in a tropical rainforest? What do you find in a tropical rainforest besides palm trees and monkeys? That’s right, class, you find bugs, Millions and millions of them. They are everywhere. Joyce is an anti-bug fanatic and goes around with a can of Dos Tigres bug-spray, shooting at anything that moves, yet still they come. It’s like the Mongol hordes descending on China. There is no way to stem the tide.

My Kathleen Turner finally arrived today. Dawn was one tired puppy.

We drove to the airport to pick her up at 7:30 am. She flew from Seattle to San Diego on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning she boarded her plane at 7:30 for the flight to Panama. After almost twenty hours traveling, she waited four hours in the Panama City airport (until Allbrook field opened at 4 am) then took a taxi across town.

She got on the 6:30 Air Panama flight and arrived in Boca at 7:30. She traveled around twenty-four hours to get here.

This is after spending a week in Seattle tending to her cousin’s memorial. When she arrived there Shelly’s dad, Bill, told her “Are we glad to see you. You take care of all the arrangements.” They then left Dawn and her brother, Duane, to handle everything. She was exhausted when she boarded the plane in Seattle.

We took her home, dragged her bags upstairs and got her settled. She was so wired that she couldn’t take a nap and (I hesitate to admit in public) more than a little grouchy.

Joyce cooked us a steak dinner. I found a piece of dorado in the freezer for Heidi. We chatted for a while, then all melted off to bed. I read for a little, then turned in. Dawn was dead in the bed.

This is where I say that we all had a peaceful night and woke to a bright sunny morning, or not.

Our HARD concrete house

Okay, back to the story. We settled into bed for a good night’s rest.

I haven’t slept well since a couple of years before Connie died. I was up with her at least every hour helping her to the bathroom, administering medication, cleaning her up or making a peanut butter sandwich for her. After she died, I never got back to my normal sleeping pattern.

So I awoke at about 2 am. I tossed and turned for an hour or so, then decided to read. What do you need when you’re reading in the middle of the night? Cookies of course.

Our room is in a small building off the main house. The deck that surrounds the house provides a walkway from our room to the main house.

When Dawn dropped dead in our bed, she had the flashlight in her hands. I didn’t want to wake her by wrestling it away from her, so I went on my mission in the dark. I mean, Indiana Jones wouldn’t need a flashlight, would he?

I crept down the walkway, into the house and found my cookies. On the way back to bed, I stepped out the door and felt for the wall to my room. It was right in front of me.

Or was it? I stepped into space and let out a blood curdling scream. (Dawn says I screamed like a little girl, but we all know I’m much too macho for that.) Then I plunged down the flight of concrete stairs.

I felt my wrist buckle underneath me as I bounced down the stairs. At the bottom, I did “face meets concrete 2.0.”

The household awoke. From out of somewhere Dawn was asking “Do you need help?”

“Get a light,” I screamed. I needed to look at my body and see what kind of damage I’d done.

It was raining and I lay there on the cold, wet landing, unable to get up. I saw a light. You know that they tell you to walk towards the light when you die. I was a goner.

Dawn examined my body with the flashlight as she knelt next to me. “Are you all right?”

“Don’t know.”

She helped me to my feet and into our room. I flopped down onto the bed. Everything hurt.

Did I dare go to sleep? You’re not supposed to let a concussion patient go to sleep. But it was the middle of the night and Dawn hadn’t slept in something like forty-eight hours. I couldn’t keep her up. I eventually drifted off to sleep.

So you see, I’m not accident prone, just the victim of circumstances.

Dawn just told Cesar (the gardener) that I’m accident prone. I object to that characterization. I’m more what you would call a victim of circumstances.

Take for instance, the boatyard. If you’ve been reading along, you know we had two months of hell cleaning, prepping and painting the Victory before we left.

As we were cleaning up on our last day, I was victimized. I was picking up tools while Dawn put the last splash of paint on the transom. The boat was completely cloaked in tarps because the boat yard workers had sanded and painted the bottom and the good state of California doesn’t want any of the noxious chemicals to get into the water.

I gathered up a paint tray, roller and a couple of paint brushes. I walked under the Victory’s hull picking up masking tape. As I stepped out from under the tarp, I was very careful not to get my feet caught in the draping tarps.

As I cleared the tarp and began to walk away, the mischievous tarp reached out and grabbed my ankle. I stumbled forward a few paces, then did a face plant on the concrete pad in the boatyard. I put my hands out to break my fall, but all I managed to break was my dignity.
I fell forward, smashing my left cheek into the concrete. I saw stars. I know I screamed because somewhere in the distance I heard someone yell, “Are you all right?”

I couldn’t answer. Pain exploded through my head, my left wrist felt broken. I couldn’t breathe much less get up.

This would be an appropriate time to tell you how dirty boat yards are. There must have been a half inch of dust, old bottom paint and just general goop on the deck. My face came up covered in blue paint that someone had sanded off their hull in about 1935. I was covered from head to foot in yuck.

But that wasn’t my biggest worry at that moment. People came running, forming a little circle around me. They were all talking and asking questions. I couldn’t answer them. Then, like Alita in the old country western song El Paso, Dawn was there, kneeling at my side.

“Are you OK?” she asked. “What happened?”

I managed to gasp “No.”

Someone showed up and put something under my head.

“Do I need to call 9-1-1?” Dawn asked.

“Yes. No. Take me to emergency.” I don’t know where those words came from. I certainly wasn’t thinking at the time.

I lay on the ground for a few minutes, then Dawn was back. She and a couple of guys helped me to my feet and into the truck.

The bottom line is that I had a concussion and a badly sprained wrist. They gave me a removable cast and I was ordered to a few days of bed rest. As you know I got the rest by taking the boat back to Chula Vista, spending a couple days working on it, then driving Dawn to the airport.

All of this was to show you that I was only the victim of circumstances. It was really not my fault.

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Penn and Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 4

7/11/2016

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The view from the front deck

Day Three, Monday, May 24th 2016

There is not much to do at Casa Tallman except relax. There is no phone service (cell signal) and no Internet. We are down on the beach with hills around us blocking the signals.

Wes and Joyce read a lot. I got up and discovered that there was no decaf in the house. Luckily, I brought my bag of Starbucks from San Diego. I had “toast” for breakfast. They eat what they call “Johnny cakes” with peanut butter and jam every morning.

The Johnny cake (that’s what the Panamanians call them too) are like a cross between a bagel and pita bread. They are about six inches in diameter and an inch thick. Wes and Joyce slice them into three pieces and toast them on a grill on their propane stove.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t like a camping stove. It’s a six-burner range with an oven. The fuel source is a propane tank in the cabinet in the island.

The kitchen

Their kitchen stretches the entire width of the house. A long cabinet with a marble countertop goes from wall to wall. Under the countertop are numerous drawers, but there are no overhead cabinets.

Why? You ask. Because the louvered windows on the back side of the house open up to allow the breeze to flow freely through. This is about the ultimate “open concept” house you can find. The dining room is in front of and to the right of the kitchen. A steep ladder leads to a loft with a queen-sized bed and armoire.

Beneath the loft is the sitting area with a couch (tropical style, of course), a love seat, a chair and a coffee table. This is also where the old analog TV lives. Or sits I should say. It died some time ago and hasn’t been replaced. There is no television signal out here, so the only thing you can watch are DVDs.

The concrete pad takes up about 5000 square feet. The closed in portion only uses about half of that. The rest of the house is outside. Big white pillars hold up the roof and the terracotta tiled floor surrounds the house, fills the causeway and surrounds the bedroom.

The deck has tropical lounge furniture. It’s great for watching a tropical storm rumble over us or just watching the ocean.

I just had to go back to the islands

I’m reminded of a Jimmy Buffet song.

     “Watch the tide roll in,
      And the sun go down.
      I just hope you understand I just had to go back to the islands.”

Did I mention that we’re only about fifty feet from the beach? Cesar is the groundskeeper and he maintains a nice open yard dotted with palm and deciduous trees. A brief walk from the front of the house and you’re standing in the sand.

At last, I am in the Caribbean Sea. I have dreamed about this since I was a teenager. I read all of the Horatio Hornblower books, all the Bolitho Books and the complete Patrick O’Brien series. Many of my heroes’ adventures take place in the Caribbean Sea, the Spanish Main of yore.

I’ve wanted to sail these storied waters and see the places my favorite characters lived. Unfortunately, I came by plane and the Victory stayed home. Hmmm . . . now we’re considering whether or not we should sail her through the canal and down here.

I was exhausted. After two months solid of working on the boat and moving, I had nothing left in the tank. My first day in Bocas was mostly napping. I took two long naps and sat around and read for most of the day.

The dining room

Day Four, Tuesday May 25th 2016

I spent most of the day learning how things work, then we went into town.

When I say we live off the grid in the middle of a tropical rain forest, I’m not kidding. There is no electricity, no water here. We have to be self-sufficient.

This morning Wes went over the water and electrical systems with me.

There are two large cisterns under the eaves of the house. When it rains, the water runs off the roof into a gutter where it is channeled to the cisterns. I’m guessing that the cisterns hold about a thousand gallons of water. We are at the beginning of the rainy season, so the cisterns were down to about half of their capacity.

In the “basement” under the house is the mechanical room. There is a water pump that pulls the water from the cisterns and fills a holding tank. When you turn on a faucet in the house, the water in the tank is pressurized and flows. The pump senses the drop in pressure and comes on to keep the pressure in the lines. No pump, no water.

How is the pump driven? Oh yes, by electricity. There is an array of solar panels on the roof that produce about one thousand watts. A bank of batteries and a bunch of boxes and switches direct the flow into the house.

The batteries store twenty-four volt electricity. There is an inverter that converts the twenty-four volt juice to one hundred and ten volt, just like you have in your house.

On the wall in the kitchen there is an electrical system monitor. It tells you how much juice you have in the batteries, how much is coming in from the solar array and how much you are using at the present time.

For the first ten or twelve years they lived here, Wes and Joyce had propane refrigerators. They were cranky, broke down often, then died early deaths (the fridges, not Wes and Joyce). Wes finally got fed up with them, joined the Twenty-First Century and bought an electric refrigerator.

It works just fine, but it’s an electricity hog. Now the solar array just barely powers the house. Wes bought a gasoline generator that we have to run every couple of days to top off the system. He’s contemplating buying another thousand volts of solar panels to provide the extra electricity the fridge takes.

The front deck

After learning about the various systems, we drove into town. Remember the pot-hole filled road I described before, the one that has Chuck holes that could swallow a Kia? That’s the road into town. It should be a half-hour drive (We’re twenty some miles out in the jungle) but with the poorly maintained road, it takes from forty-five minutes to an hour, depending upon your appetite for a rough ride. If you drive fast, you’ll tear the suspension out of your car (I mean truck).

After the washout, the road improves. There are still some pot holes, but you can usually swerve around them. Traffic is so light, it’s no problem driving in the other lane.

At the end of our road, we turn right onto the main road and drive along the beach for several miles into town.

Entering Bocas del Toro Town (Or Bocas Town, as the locals call it), you first see some rundown looking shacks. Then there are a couple of large restaurant/bars along the beach that look like they’re long past their best days. Then you come to a bunch of empty vendors stands.

This is the fair grounds. While the fair is in session they close the road (the only road going out of town to the north end or the Bluff Beach area) and have a party. Cars wanting to go into town have to drive on the beach.

After the fairgrounds, there is a plywood arch over the road welcoming you to Bocas. Wes said he thought there were about seven or eight thousand people in Bocas Town, but my guide books says it’s more like twenty-thousand. This is the biggest (and only) town in the islands.

Wes gave me the tour, showing me how to get to the airport, the bank, where the grocery stores are and the best restaurants.

The only problem was, that I was so jet lagged and turned around, I had no idea where I was. We stopped at the Gourmet Market, a little shop at the extreme end of town, across from the ferry dock. It was surprisingly stocked with all sorts of American brands. I saw that they had decaf there and grabbed a bag.

Let me tell you about Panamanian coffee. The people I talked to are all excited about their coffee. The best in the world they say. My favorite coffees are the Pacific Island coffees. They are robust (some say too strong) and full of the earthy flavors of the volcanic soil. The Panamanian coffee is kind of like warm, brown water.

After the confusing tour of town and a Margarita at the Pub, we headed home. The temperatures are in the low 80’s, but the humidity is 100%. My clothes stuck to my body and sweat covered me head to foot.

Wes had a doctor’s appointment in David (pronounced Dah-veed) the second largest city in Panama, just across the isthmus from Bocas, tomorrow. We took him to the airport so he could make his morning appointment, then headed back to the house for a quiet evening.

Our (private) beach

When we got home, the only solution to the sweat problem was to go swimming. I headed down to the beach and walked west until I was past the area with rocks to a nice sandy bottom. I was a bit cautious at first. I hadn’t swum in the ocean in years.

The waves were about two feet high and broke just before the shoreline. I waded out a few feet, up to my ankles, then a wave lifted me and pushed me back ashore. The next time I waded out and dove into the wave.

It was unbelievably refreshing. The water was the same temperature as the air, but it felt cool and invigorating. The beach drops off incredibly fast. A few steps into the water and I couldn’t touch bottom. I swam out about a quarter mile to get out of the breakers close to shore.

It was heaven. I lay in the water, contemplating the meaning of life. I did my water aerobics exercises. I swam like a kid on summer break.

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Penn and Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 3

7/4/2016

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My first view of Casa Tallman

Day Two, Sunday, May 23rd 2016

I awoke around 11 am. My stay included a free breakfast, so I got dressed and headed down to the restaurant to see if they were still serving.

It was late for breakfast and I was the only one in the restaurant. I gave the server my breakfast coupon and she disappeared.

Sometime later, she showed up again (remember, we’re now on Panama time. No one is rushed.) with a plate holding scrambled eggs and two slices of ham luncheon meat. The eggs were hardly edible and the ham was worse. Oh, well, it filled the hole.

This is where I mention that no one serves decaf in Latin America. Because of my Minuere’s Disease, I can’t drink caffeine. If I don’t brew it here, I don’t drink it.

After a leisurely breakfast (who’s rushed with this kind of food?), I headed back upstairs to pack. It didn’t take long, all I’d used was my toothbrush and a pair of jammies.

The hotel has a free shuttle to the airport. My flight into Panama was to their main airport. The puddle jumper I took to Bocas flew out of a little airport on the other side of town. I asked the shuttle to take me to Albrook Field and they told me they didn’t go there, only to the main airport.

I made my first Panamanian error. I had them call me a cab and I didn’t ask the driver how much it would cost. When we got to the airport, he wanted $48. Wes tells me it should never cost more than $35. These are US prices.

One of the nice things about Panama is that they use US currency, so there’s no math involved in figuring out how much something costs.

Air Panama Flight 457

I sat in the waiting area and took out my Kindle. Before I could get started reading, an Air Panama worker came over and told me the plane was boarding. I hustled to catch up with the other passengers.

There were only eight of us on the plane. Since we were all seated and ready to go, the pilot took off half an hour early.

The flight to Bocas was on a twin engine, high-winged turbo-prop plane. The seats were infinitely more comfortable than the Airbus and you actually got the sensation of flying. I wanted to see if I could slip the pilot twenty bucks to let me fly the plane.

We took off and soon were out of the city. Below me, jungle spread out as far as the eye could see. We hugged the coastline all the way to Bocas. It was a pleasant one-hour flight. I enjoyed watching the scenery go by. We only flew at about five thousand feet, so the visibility was great.

As we got over the islands of the Bocas del Toro Archipelago I took particular notice. The area around the islands is littered with sandbars and reefs. Being a deep draft boat, we would have to be especially careful if we ever brought the Victory here.

By the time we landed, I was desperate to find a bathroom. There were two ladies at a table checking people in. I walked past them to find the facilities, expecting to come back and check in after my stop.

When I got back, Wes and Joyce were there waiting for me.

“I’ll be just a minute” I said, “I have to pick up my bag.”

An Air Panama employee heard me and said “Over here.” He had my bag waiting outside the check in area.

I tell you this because they charged every visitor that got off the plane $3 for a garbage fee. Wes suspects that the proceeds go directly to the mayor’s slush fund, because he’s never seen any money spent on improving the dump. I did not contribute to the graft.

Penn and Dawn on the road to Bocas

We piled into Wes’s Toyota pickup and headed to the house. At first the road was good enough. There are two roads on the island, one goes to the north side of the island where Wes and Joyce live and the other follows the coast around the to Bluff Beach.

My first impression of Bocas del Toro was of a rundown Mexican town. Most of the buildings are wooden with tired siding. They were all built in the last century. All of them need at least a fresh coat of paint; many looked like they were on the verge of falling down. There are several buildings under construction. It looks like the job was started about fifty years ago and they just gave up on it.

We passed the one gas station in the islands on the way out of town. There aren’t many cars here. Tourist and ex-pats drive cars. The locals with vehicles drive trucks because they only have one if they use it for work. Everybody else either walks or rides bicycles.

The first thing I noticed was that all the taxis were four-wheel drive, double cabs pickups. I soon learned why.

We turned off the main road and headed into the hills. The road got progressively worse. At first there were only a few pot holes that Wes easily avoided. Then the road deteriorated.

We came to a spot where the road was washed out. It had been filled with gravel, so we could get through. After that, there were more pot holes than there was road. No one pays any attention to the lanes and Wes spent as much time driving in the on-coming lane as he did in our lane.

Then the jungle began to encroach on the road. The two-lane road became a one-and-a-half-lane road. The jungle had eaten up most of the other lane. At places the jungle moved in from both sides and it was a one-lane road.

I felt like Michael Douglas in "Romancing the Stone."

That's when it hit me. I felt like Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone. I kept a sharp eye out for Kathleen Turner stranded on the side of the road. She wouldn’t show up for a couple of days when her cousin’s funeral was over.

After about twenty miles on the pot-hole express, the road turned to dirt. It was much easier to drive on.

Wes says they live in a gated community. There is a heavy, rusted iron gate on the road. I had to get out and unlock it.

Now comes the fun part. We turned down a long driveway to the house. My first view was of the back wall. It looked like a two-story mansion.

We got out and lugged my baggage up a steep staircase. When we reached the top floor (the living area) I noticed that most of the house was outside.

The house is built on concrete pillars to keep it dry when a storm forces the waves ashore. It’s about fifty feet from the beach. The property is thirteen acres with about four hundred and fifty feet of beach-front.

At the top of the stairs there is an open-air hallway leading to Wes and Joyce’s room. It’s a separate building from the main house, connected by the causeway.
Going in the other direction took me into the kitchen. The main building has a large kitchen, a dining area, a sitting area and a bathroom with a loft above the sitting area.

Both in the bedroom and the main house, louvered teak doors open the front of the house to the sea. A pleasant breeze made the hot, sticky day comfortable.

On the other side of the main building, a small building houses the second bedroom. It’s tiny. It barely has room for two single beds.

I got myself settled in and took a little nap. I had very little sleep in the last twenty-four hours.

Reading is the main activity at Casa Tallman, so I grabbed my Kindle and joined it. Wes and Joyce go to bed around nine o’clock, so I took my book into my room and read for a couple of hours before drifting off.

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Penn Finally Makes it to Panama

6/25/2016

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A mama monkey and her baby transverse our front yard

Day one, Saturday, May 22nd 2016

Traveling is hell. I had a friend who used to tell me that travel was miserable at best. You need to prepare for the worst: delayed flights, uncomfortable beds, long waits in dingy airports. Then, if things go well, it's just a bonus.

I bought tickets on Spirit Airlines because they were cheap. I mean really cheap. Dawn and I saved a thousand dollars over the next least expensive tickets I could find.

I soon found out why,

Our friend Dana was kind enough to pick me up at 5:30 in the morning and take me to the airport (Remember, Dawn had already flow to Seattle for her cousin’s memorial). I had been hearing about the long lines at security and people missing their flights. At 5:30 it took me ten minutes to clear security. Score!

When it was time to board the plane, I had my first disappointment. We entered the plane and to my dismay it was an Airbus A380. An AIRBUS! People from Seattle don’t fly on Airbuses. We’re loyal to Boeing.

When I made the reservations, I could have sworn that it said we’d be flying on a Boeing 737-9. I guess I looked at so many airlines I got mixed up.

Oh well, I was on the plane and it was too late to change,

First let me say that I had a window seat. I planned to trade with the person who had the aisle seat. Unfortunately, all three people in my row were big guys and the one on the aisle didn’t want to switch.

So I crowded into the window seat. Unlike a Boeing, the fuselage of the A-380 curved in sharply on the window seat and I felt like I was in a sardine can.

Then there were the seats. They reminded me of something you’d find in a homemade dune buggy. They didn’t adjust and they didn’t have a layer of foam, just fabric over fiberglass.

Spirit bills themselves as America’s first ultra low cost airline. You pay a cheap rate for the seat, then they charge for everything else. No free drinks or munchies, no carry-ons, no checked baggage. If you want to fly in the clothes you’re wearing, it’s the airline for you. Otherwise, it all cost extra.

On Dawn’s flight, when the flight attendant was doing the safety talk, he said, “In the event we lose cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead. Swipe your credit cards here to start the oxygen flowing. If your card is rejected, that’s just too bad.”

The first leg of the flight was from San Diego to Huston. We had an hour between flights. I thought I’d grab a bite before boarding. There was a Wendy’s and a BBQ joint at our gate. The Wendy’s had a long line, but the BBQ joint was no wait.

I learned why the Wendy’s was so busy.

I thought, we’re in Texas, I’ve got to order BBQ. I ordered a beef brisket sandwich for eleven dollars. The meat was so tough that I thought they must have driven the cow to market and beat it to death with a stick. The BBQ sauce was practically non-existent. I only ate about three bites.

When I got back on the plane, about half the people had Wendy's bags. Lesson learned.

On to Fort Lauderdale and a six hour stop over.

The same plane took us on the second leg and was equally uncomfortable. In Fort Lauderdale airport, I went in search of a bar. I’m not a big drinker and I don’t usually frequent bars, but it had been a rough day of travel and I wouldn’t arrive in Panama until 1 am.

I searched high and low through the airport and finally found a Cuban restaurant with a little bar. I took an empty seat and a guy sat next to me who wanted to watch the Preakness Stakes. He was a big horse race fan. I know nothing about horse racing. He spent the next hour educating me.

A nice couple from Atlanta took the two seats to my right. The four of us got into a general discussion about racing. The young man asked me “Are you a college professor or author or something. You know so much about everything.”

I can’t pass up an opening like that. I told him I was an author and we were off on an hour’s discussion of writing and my books. I gave them all a card and they promised to read my books. When the couple left, the man shook my hand and said “I can’t wait to tell my friends I met a famous author at an airport bar.”

Jim, if you ever read this, thank you. That made my day.

Being that the bar was in a Cuban restaurant, I ordered a Cuban dish. I can’t remember the name, but it was a skirt steak in a vinegary marinade with rice and beans and fried plantains. It was really good. That’s my second time eating Cuban food and I was impressed.

Two Margaritas is my limit. I walked (or should I say, staggered) out of the bar to find my gate. I still had a couple of hours, so I read.

Here’s an unabashed advertisement for Kindle: I love it. I have dozens of books on the device so when I finish one book, I can just switch over to another. I finished the book I had been reading and immediately went on to the next.

11 pm finally came and we boarded another Airbus. Three hours of discomfiture and we were landing in Panama City.

Clearing customs was nothing. I was checked in by a very nice lady. I spoke to her in Spanish and she treated me like an honored guest. They ran my bags through an X-ray machine, but the woman who was running the machine didn’t even look at the monitor, she was too busy talking to a handsome young man in a security guard’s uniform.

It was 2 o’clock in the morning by the time I made it to my hotel. They checked me in and I collapsed into bed. But I was here, I was in Panama.

A sloth in the front yard

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Penn and Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 1

6/17/2016

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Dawn Varnishing Cabin Top

Before the Adventure

Remember me?

Yes I am still alive. I try to keep my blog up to date and maintain a presence on Facebook, but sometimes life gets in the way.

So here’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. We moved out of our apartment at the end of March. Our plan was to do a few things on the boat to get her all purty, then put her up for sale and head to Panama.

Dawn’s mother, Joyce, lives in Panama. They have a beautiful place right on the beach way out in the jungle on Isla Colon, Caribbean living at its best (or so I’ve been told). Dawn has never seen the place and I’m always up for an adventure.

Anyway, we cleared out of our apartment and moved back on the boat. I made arrangements to have her hauled out and give the bottom a fresh coat of paint. Of course, nothing ever goes according to plan.

I had been trying to haul the Victory out since December. Twice we made reservations with the boatyard in Ensenda. That’s where we had her hauled last and they did good work for a reasonable price.

The first scheduled date was in December. We were going to sail down to Ensenada, about 60 miles south of San Diego, then haul out.

Mother Nature got in the way. Dry, mild San Diego got hit with a humongous storm. Discretion being the better part of valor, we canceled and stayed warm and dry.

In March we tried again. Again a big storm swooped in out of the Pacific and stopped us.

One of our neighbors in the marina told us about a boat yard where they hauled out at a very reasonable price. I called and made arrangements to go there.

As our scheduled date came around, the marina called and said that they were having problems with their marine railway and had to push us back two weeks.

Not a problem. We had so much work to do on the boat that we could do at the dock, we just rolled up our sleeves and waded in.

I tackle the plumbing

I spent the first week working on plumbing. I don’t know how so many things could go wrong with the boat just sitting there, but I had a full week of plumbing chores.

I never begrudge what a plumber charges. The work is so ugly that they earn every bit of what they make. Working on a boat is no different.
I spent a week crawling around in the bilges and shimmying under sinks. The job stunk.

I case you don’t remember, I had knee surgery last year and I can’t crawl around on my hands and knees. Getting up and down is a painful experience. I was soooooo glad when the job was completed.

Next we spend a couple of weeks stripping all of the old varnish from the boat. It had set in the tropical sun for three years and looked awful.

Like any painting job, prepping the surface was the hardest part of the job. It took the better part of two weeks to prep the wood, but only a couple of days to apply the varnish.

Finally, the big day came. We cast off our mooring lines and headed up the bay to Kohler Kraft Boatyard.

It’s about a two-hour trip from Chula Vista to Shelter Island. The boatyard was in America’s Cup Harbor, on the east end of the island. I got a little mixed up.

We entered the harbor, but couldn’t find the boat yard. As a matter of fact, we couldn’t find ANY boatyards.

I was confused. I knew that there were several boatyards right next to each other on Shelter Island. I called the marina and guess what? We were in Harbor Island, not Shelter Island.

We haul the Victory out

Things got worse from there. Our engine died trying to turn around in the narrow channel. There were floats with multi-million dollar yachts on one side and twenty feet or so on the other side, there was a rock lined embankment.

I couldn’t let the boat drift in that narrow space, so I dropped the anchor. It held, but the current was swinging us around towards the rocks. I dropped the stern anchor to keep us in the channel.

Going below, I changed fuel filters and the engine started right up. Now to raise the anchors.

The bow anchor was no problem. We have an electrical wench that pulled the sixty pound plow anchor right to the surface.

The stern anchor was another problem. The stern anchor is a forty pound Danforth anchor with wide flukes. The bottom was muddy and at least twenty or thirty pounds of mud clung to our anchor.

We have no wench for the stern anchor, so I had to pull it up by hand. It wouldn’t come. As I pulled it in, the boat would drift back over the anchor chain, and I couldn’t pull any more.

Dawn took the controls of the boat and inched forward when I needed it and back when the anchor chain became taunt.

A man in a dingy with a big outboard was passing by and asked if we needed help. Since we were swinging on one anchor, I asked him to keep us in the main channel buy putting the bow of his rubber boat to our bow and maintaining constant pressure.

We flailed around for about a half hour when one of the men from the marina offered to help. I was exhausted, so I welcomed the extra muscle.
The dinghy picked him up and soon we had the anchor on deck and were on our way.

Dawn takes a break

We entered America’s Cup Harbor and found the boatyard. It had narrow fairways and there was a stiff breeze blowing.

I maneuvered the Victory into the dock next to the ways, but the wind kept pushing us away. Two guys from the boatyard came down to take our lines.

They were yelling at me to do one thing, Dawn was yelling at me to do something else. The beach was only a few feet away. I panicked (not something I usually do) and switched gears from reverse to forward.
I goofed. I didn’t shut down the throttle and take the transmission out of gear before I changed. There was a loud crunching sound, and the boat was dead in the water. The transmission was gone.

The boat yard guys jumped in their dinghy and sped to our rescue. The Victory was simply too big and heavy for them to move against the wind and current. The wind blew us down on the adjoining dock and we fought to keep from smashing into the other boats. Then we went gently aground.

I called for vessel assist to send a tow boat to get us out of our predicament. It took about a half hour for them to get there. We fought the entire time not to damage the other boats. Oh, and did I mention that the tide was falling too?

When the tow boat arrived they expertly took us in tow and moved us the fifty feet to our dock. By then it was too late in the day to haul the boat, so we settled in for the night.

We slept on the boat and first thing in the morning we checked in with the boatyard manager. The foreman came in with bad news.

Last night he asked how wide the boat was. I answered, “fourteen feet nine inches.”

“No problem, the car is fifteen feet wide, you should be able to fit.”
This morning it was a different story. He measured the boat, it was fifteen feet three inches if you included the rub rails.

“I’m just saying it might not fit.”

What else could go wrong?

They lowered the car in the water and floated the Victory onto it. It fit!

The rub rails were below the supports on the car and didn’t touch anything.

A marine railway is an antiquated method of hauling boats out of the water. There are railroad tracks going down into the water. An engine at the top of the ramp slowly lowers a car on the rails until it is deep enough for us to float in. When the boat is secure on the car, the engine pulls us out of the water.

Then there is what reminded me of a turn table in a railroad roundhouse where the car is shuttled off to the space where we will live.

Victory ready to go back in the water

The whole operation went very smoothly. Now it was time to get to work.
We hauled on a Thursday, The boat yard doesn’t work on weekends, so we took the time to paint the top of the hull.

Not as easy as it sounds. We had to sand and prep the entire surface. It was a horrible job. There was a big Chris Craft cruiser in the slot next to us with not more than an inch of clearance between the two cars. We got the starboard side sanded and ready to go. On Friday afternoon, they put the Chris Craft back in the water and we could work on the port side.

Okay, I admit it. We were tired, we hurt all over and sometimes tempers got short. Somehow or other we managed to paint the boat without killing each other, but it was a close call.

We hired a couple of guys to help us prep and paint. They worked hard on Friday, but didn’t show up on Saturday. I guess if they were dependable, they would have steady jobs.

I don’t know why Dawn puts up with me. I pushed her right to the edge.
Finally the job was done and it was time to put the boat back in the water. Now we just had one problem, how to get home.

The transmission didn’t work. We called our mechanic and he said we needed to get the boat back to our marina where he could work on it.

Vessel assist once again came to the rescue. They towed us from Shelter Island and all the way down to Chula Vista and worked us into our slip as easy as a cat stretching out for a nap.

I really thank these guys. I have towing insurance, so it didn’t cost anything. The bill for both tow jobs came to almost eleven hundred dollars. The two hundred dollars for a year’s worth of insurance seemed like nothing.

The boat was home, but we still had a ton of work to do.

The forward cabin top is made of plywood. After nearly forty years, it was delaminating. I called a couple of shipwrights to give me an estimate. It was going to cost over four thousand dollars and take two weeks to fix it.
I didn’t have that kind of money to put into the project. That was double the budget I had set for repairs.

I did it myself. It was a very challenging project. It took me a week and cost less than three hundred dollars. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t look too bad and it is serviceable.

While I was fighting with the cabin roof, Dawn sanded the deck and prepped the cabin for paint. Then she painted all the black trim.

By the time I was done, she was almost through painting the cabins. Then tragedy struck.

Dawn’s cousin, Shelly died. Shelly was a couple months older than Dawn and they grew up like sisters. Dawn was devastated.

We already had our tickets for the Panama trip, but I felt it was imperative that Dawn go home to be with her family. She finally agreed.
Money wasn’t the issue, yes it cost us a few hundred bucks to change her reservations and get tickets to Seattle, but at a time like this, you must be with family.

I put her on a plane on Thursday, then went back to work. I finished the chores on my list, but we didn’t get the deck resurfaced. With Dawn gone, it was just too big a job to tackle on my own and expect to get it done in one day.

I'll start telling the story of the Panama Trip in my next post. Sorry it took so long to get here.

All's well that ends well

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March 19th, 2016

3/19/2016

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Last time I shared an interview I did with world famous author Carmen Amato. Her Emilia Cruz series has been optioned for a TV series. You have to run fast to keep up with this author.

This week, we're going one step further. Carmen interviews her lead character Emilia Cruz. Emilia is the first, and only, female detective on the Acapulco police force. If you've read her adventures, you're going to love this interview. If you haven't read her books, you're going to want to get them.

Carmen is running the show from here on out.

Carmen's Interview with Acapulco police detective Emilia Cruz

What do you hope your obituary will say about you?

That I died of old age. In bed.

Cops in Mexico die young. Hunted down by cartel gangs. Gunned down on the street.

I hope I beat the odds.

Is there anyone you’d like to acknowledge and thank for their support?

He knows what I owe him and how I feel, even if the words don’t come easily.

His name is Kurt Rucker and he manages the Palacio Réal hotel on the eastern side of Acapulco. Kurt has created an oasis for me, where I can forget the crime and violence on the streets, at least for a little while.
How do you feel about social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter? Are they a
good thing?
As you know, social media sites play an important role in almost every police investigation. Gang members like to boast about their killings and crime on social media and it is often the first place we find information. But it works against us as well.

In Mexico, the best defense a cop has against the cartels and gangs is to be as anonymous and “unfindable” as possible. If one of them gets online information related to our identity, they’ll share it. Finding and killing the cop becomes a deadly game. This is why law enforcement officers who raid cartel hideouts are always masked.

Sometimes I think about setting up a Twitter account to ask for information to help me find women from Acapulco who have gone missing. An anonymous tip line. I call those women Las Perdidas, the Lost Ones.

What makes you angry?

My partner, Franco Silvio, is the most infuriating man in the world. He’s the senior detective in the squadroom and probably the smartest, but masks it by being rude and stubborn. As a former boxing champ, he can also be physically intimidating and downright scary.

He once told me he’d do whatever it took to make my life miserable so I would quit being a detective. He didn’t believe women should be in that job. But I am the first female police detective in Acapulco and I’m here to stay.

We ended up working a drug smuggling case together. It involved a stakeout at Acapulco’s Maxitunnel, the main artery for traffic into the city. The smugglers used water delivery trucks to get drums of drugs in and out of the city and had a processing zone under the tunnel’s maintenance area. Franco and I saved each other’s life that day.

I think it is a shock that he now has a female partner. He may never really get over it.

Do you know your neighbors?

Imagine living in a hotel. People come and go all the time.

I live in the penthouse of the Palacio Réal hotel with Kurt, so it’s not exactly like having neighbors. Kurt’s best friend, Jacques, head chef at the hotel restaurant, is a neighbor. Both men are marathoners and triathletes.

Jacques is French and amusing and thankfully didn’t tell Kurt when I spilled wine on a party guest to avoid having to answer questions about how Kurt and I met. I didn’t want the woman, whose husband is probably Russian mafia, to know I am a cop.

Kurt and I met during an investigation. He came to inquire about an impounded car that belonged to a departed hotel guest. He didn’t know it was loaded with drug money to pay a ransom.

Next thing I knew, my lieutenant washed up dead in a boat on the Palacio Réal’s private beach. Once again, I was thrown together with Kurt. I don’t know if I would have survived—literally—that investigation without him.

What does love mean to you?

I’m uncomfortable answering that. Next question, please.

What social issues interest you the most?

What if someone you cared about went missing? Your mother, your sister, your wife.

And no one did anything to help you?

I keep records on women from Acapulco who have gone missing. I try to find them when the official effort is over. Only about 1% of crimes in Mexico result in conviction, one of the lowest rates in the civilized world.

Why? Corruption, incompetence, lack of resources. Take your pick. They are all to blame.

But I’ll keep looking for Las Perdidas. Someone has to.

What is your favorite quality about yourself?

I’m a good liar.

What is your least favorite quality about yourself?

I’m a frequent liar.

What is your favorite quote, by whom, and why?

“The thief thinks that all men are thieves.” It’s an old Mexican proverb.

I see the truth in it every day, from the city official who assumes everyone else is as rabidly ambitious and will do anything to get what they want, to the street gang member who assumes that everyone else has such little regard for life.

What are you most proud of accomplishing so far in your life?
I’m the first and only female police detective on the Acapulco force. I scored the highest on the written exam that year, got an endorsement from my patrol sergeant, and won the hand-to-hand combat competition. In the final bout, I beat a guy everyone thought was going to win, by choking him. He tapped out but the crowd was so loud I never heard him.

Even after all that, the lieutenant in charge of detectives refused to let me take the job unless one of the other detectives agreed to be my partner. Rico Portillo stepped up. He gave me my chance.

I heard that some chica from New York wrote a story about how I came to be a detective and gives it away for free. Que estupida.

What is your favorite food?

Acapulco is famous for seafood and I love it all. My favorite might be pescado empapelado; marinated fish wrapped in foil and grilled with lemon and garlic and tomato. Open the foil packet and the smell is tantalizing.

There’s a tiny loncheria near the fishing docks on Avenida Azueta. Three tables and the best fish in the world.

What’s your favorite place in the entire world?
The balcony outside my bedroom at the Palacio Réal. It wraps around two sides of the penthouse and overlooks both the ocean and the hotel’s famous outdoor Pasodoble Bar. The balcony is decorated with teak chaise lounges, cobalt cushions, and glazed pots full of geraniums.

I can be up there at night and look over the wall and see a dozen ceramic lanterns, each as big as a barrel, like a dramatic barrier of flames and color between the water and the edge of the Pasodoble’s lower terrace. I stare at the ocean and clear my head when I’m worried about a case or furious over my latest argument with Franco Silvio. On the balcony, I’m hidden but still free.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I know I have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. The violent crime rate in the state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located, is so high that the life expectancy rate has dropped. The number of femicides and missing women continues to rise.

In five years, I hope I’m alive and working as a detective.

I hope I’m still with Kurt, because, well . . .

Oye, would you look at the time! I have to be . . . uh . . . at a meeting for a case. Yes, a really important case. You understand, I’m sure.

Detective Emilia Cruz is featured in the novels Cliff Diver, Hat Dance, Diablo Nights, and the collection of short stories Made in Acapulco by mystery author Carmen Amato. Originally from New York, Carmen’s experiences living in Mexico and Central America drive the authenticity and drama of her writing. Visit her website at carmenamato.net for a free copy of The Beast, the first Emilia Cruz story.

That's it for this week. Next week I'll interview mega-author Jinx Schwartz.

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Interview With Carmen Amato

3/7/2016

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In addition to political thriller The Hidden Light of Mexico City, Carmen Amato is the author of the Emilia Cruz mystery series set in Acapulco, including Cliff Diver, Hat Dance, Diablo Nights, and the collection of short stories Made in Acapulco. Originally from New York, Carmen’s experiences living in Mexico and Central America drive the authenticity and drama of her writing. Visit her website at carmenamato.net for a free copy of The Beast, the first Emilia Cruz story.

Carmen:
First of all, thanks so much for inviting me to chat. I’ve been up to my ears in the fourth Emilia Cruz mystery, KING PESO, and am happy to take a break!

Penn: Every writer has their own idea of what a successful career in writing is, what does success in
writing look like to you?

Carmen:
What a great question! Success as an author used to mean the New York Times bestseller lists and a royalty from a recognized publisher. Now, it’s about building a community of readers and fellow authors who share ideas and experiences.

Success means being able to give back. In 2014, along with fellow authors Jerry Last, Norm Hamilton, and Sharon Lee Johnson, I donated a dollar for every Kindle book sold to water.org, the charity co-founded by Matt Damon to bring clean water and decent sanitation to communities worldwide. Our goal was to provide 25 people safe and clean water for life. We exceeded our expectations with resources for 31 people.

This year I’m focusing on helping other authors achieve their goals, with free resources on my website, carmenamato.net for those who have always wanted to write a mystery series but didn’t know how to start. Plus a free story, “The Beast,” which is the first Emilia Cruz story and tells how she came to be a detective.

Penn:
Tell us about your new book? What’s it about and why did you write it?

Carmen:
I have two projects going on right now. The first is AWAKENING MACBETH, a romantic suspense novel with a paranormal twist released as a serial on my blog at carmenamato.net. It wrapped on 1 March with episode 65. Later this year, it will be published for ebook and print.

The fourth Emilia Cruz novel, KING PESO, will be out this year as well. KING PESO opens as Emilia believes she has been selected for a task force investigating the recent murders of three law enforcement officials. The El Trio victims have nothing in common, except that Emilia worked with all of them. But of course, nothing is as it seems.

Penn:
How much of the book is realistic?

Carmen:
Not just KING PESO, but the entire Emilia Cruz mystery series is very authentic to what is happening in Mexico today. Emilia’s challenges are pulled right from the headlines. There’s no need for me to make up bizarre serial killers when cartel violence and corrupt politicians provide more than enough inspiration. For example, Emilia’s perpetual hunt for women who have gone missing—referred to as Las Perdidas or the Lost Ones--was inspired by the hundreds of women missing from the Juarez area.

Penn:
Have you included a lot of your life experiences,
even friends, in the plot?

Carmen:
I often build characters around traits I see in other people, both good and bad. One of my best sources of inspiration are politicians, especially those running for public office.

For example, I was in the airport in Burlington, Vermont, a few weeks ago. A tubby little man had wedged himself into a corner across from the line for the ticket counter. He was running for a city council office getting everyone in line to sign his petition to get on the ballot. He had a captive audience and was totally immune to people’s discomfort with his spiel. I never asked his name, but his sales pitch and persistence will help shape a new character.Penn:
How do you write – lap top, pen, paper, in bed, at a desk?

Carmen:
I outline each book on sticky notes. Each plot line, or thread, gets a different color. Each sticky represents a scene. Once I have the scenes arranged on the wall in the correct sequence, the sticky notes get transferred to a poster and hung over my desk. I will revise the outline 2-3 times during the initial drafting period.

I often write a scene longhand in a spiral notebook, then type it in. Editing the complete manuscript is the most fun. That’s when the story really comes to life. I love to heighten tension, add drama, amp up the action.

Penn:
What genre are you most comfortable writing?

Carmen:
Mysteries appeal to all of us. The intrigue. The tension. The suspicions. Insinuations and motivations. Dialogue in which one character tries to break the other. The confession that turns out to be a lie.

*shiver*

The Detective Emilia Cruz novels are police procedural mysteries, in which competing motivations and agendas drive the narrative. HIDDEN LIGHT and AWAKENING MACBETH cross over into the romantic suspense genre but have mysterious elements.

Penn:
What is your greatest strength as a writer?

Carmen:
Persistence. I always finish a manuscript.

Notice I did not say speed.

Penn:
What books have influenced your writing?

Carmen:
GONE WITH THE WIND, by Margaret Mitchell. Remember when Rhett Butler abandons Scarlett O’Hara on the road to Tara as the Yankees take Atlanta? Scarlett wants to call him all the names her father had called balky mules but can only come up with “cad.” It was a memorable scene because for the first time, I was completely inside a character’s head. I want my readers to have that same experience.

THE KEY TO REBECCA by Ken Follett. This thriller was really my role model for THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF MEXICO CITY. Follett’s early novels all have a tension-filled storyline, interesting characters with complex relationships, and multiple voices that are all integral to moving the plot forward.

Not to mention the hot sex scenes.

Ahem.

Penn:
When you wish to end your career, stop writing, and look back on your life, what thoughts
would you like to have?

Carmen:
I was not bored.

And I wasn’t boring, either.

Penn:
Thank you Carmen. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. I look forward to the next Emilia Cruz novel.

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