Entries about games

After a lovely and lazy two weeks in Dominical, Costa Rica we decided it was time to head south to Panama.

Our final days on the beach were spent hanging out...

exercising with friends...

and touring around the countryside in our magic bus.

But life can't be all mangoes and unrefrigerated cream, can it? Onward to Panama, I say!

Where's my hair??? Oh, yeah. It froze off on the 15-hour meat locker ride on Tica Bus from San Jose to Panama City. I felt like Martin Short in Inner Space.

So there we were in Panama City!

Or was it Miami?

Nope, it's the Panama.

Lovely, Panama City, where urban renewal, traffic, and shopping malls make you feel like you're right back at home in the good old USA. And then you see this thing,

And eat a $2 lunch at this place,

And huh?

And then you realize you're not in Kansas City anymore. You're in a vibrant, Americanized, sprawling, and schizophrenic metropolis,

where you find the occasional bullet hole in the window next to the tourist sights of the old town in Casco Viejo, dollars are the accepted currency at the local Hard Rock Cafe, and you can still get a room with A/C and a flat screen tv for $30/night in the cushy Coco del Mar district at Panama by Luis.

We're not here for the canal or the causeway or the casino. We're here for the $3 block of pepper jack cheese and the Belgian beer at the 24 hour supermarket down the street. For after two months on the road, those are the things that road-weary travelers most appreciate.

Cheese is expensive and impossible to find in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
--Every traveler who's ever been there.

Oh yeah, the rain has stopped.

At Playa Carrillo, four crazy friends invent a new version of Bocce Ball:

Watch it on youtube here.

And that was the best I ever did.