We awoke this morning to fresh breezes, blue skies and bright crisp wintry sunshine. With no sweating, insects, or humidity, this is Panama’s dry season at last, enjoyed in an alpine town perched in a valley swept by downdrafts of air shaking tree limbs and sending leaves flying.
It’s the sort of morning your dog sits on the floor of the van whining piteously wondering why you aren’t ready to throw off your blanket and come out to play.
That is a question to which there is only one answer so out one goes onto the empty Sunday morning streets to see what we can see together.
Suburban America at its finest, mowing the lawn with the added weekend cliché of elderly Americans nearby gearing up in spandex for an energetic bicycle ride! Boquete is more like suburban America than anywhere we have been thus far, so if you want to emigrate and remain culturally at home this is the place for you.
I quite like this town which quite aside from the mild climate has all the trappings of home, bakeries, restaurants, brew pubs and barbecue. Signs are in English and gentrification is as usual pushing locals to the margins. And yet there is a certain energy here that I am learning to enjoy.
And you know how people in Miami using Spanish as their primary language drives Anglo Americans mad with irritation? Around here English is the language and Spanish is an after thought! I find the irony delicious. Mind you I also find Spanish language predominance in Miami irritating but both here and there not even trying to learn the other language is very limiting.
There is something very appealing about the way Boquete drifts between cultures, and this week Tuesday is a national holiday, Panana loves national holidays, and the town is filled with the usual gringo residents plus a bunch of youthful backpackers but also Panamanian couples and families who are filling up hotel rooms determined to enjoy town as well.
Panama isn’t a country of architecture and colorful poverty. There aren’t dogs on the streets, beggars or massive Spanish colonial churches. Boquete is a small prosperous town busy recovering from the effects of the recent shut down across the country. Shop keepers have much lost time to make up after the road closures and protests that took six weeks to shut down the country’s largest and most ecologically destructive open face mine.
I am not much in the mood to recount our not quite settled mechanical delays. All the parts installed are working, bushings bearings brakes and rotors are all properly installed (I think) but now we have a a brake pump controller that has shown up on the computer indicating incipient signs of failure. Sigh.
There are six of these available in the US and after much phone calling and struggle we found Jerry Ulm the Ram dealer in Tampa willing to help out. They say they will have one on Tuesday and ship it to our shipping agent’s Miami office to be forwarded to us. We may have it in ten days. I hope. Jerry Ulm has helped us out previously when we had an alternator problem in Florida so I think we may be getting ready to accept the dealership as our mechanical support in future. It says something when the dealer outperforms the independent shop.
We still have some housekeeping to do this week including going to the customs office in the city to extend our vehicle permit for another thirty days, get the ever present laundry done and our mechanic wants to spend Tuesday going over everything to make sure the brakes are correct and the wheels aligned and so forth. It is frankly pretty boring stuff but the idea is to be set up for South America of course.
Our Canadian Land Rover friends Hugh and Sue broke their suspension on a rough track but they kicked it back into place as you do on older less delicate machinery and they are shipping to Colombia next week. 
Not us, but strangely I’m pretty zen about these delays. South America will be there when we get there and Layne is being extraordinarily zen about the outflow of money to make these repairs. So it could be worse. A lot worse really as we could have had these issues in some remote place in the road. Instead I think Layne is organizing a cinnamon roll hunt later and I might have to stalk some Kansas barbecue in town.
Tough life waiting for parts. Happy Sunday!
