Beach Bumming

Panamanian Mafia Visitors With my Wife

I’ve embraced my new role as a beach bum. This may be causing my wife some issues as I don’t think she honestly thought I’m as ready to  retire as I’ve been indicating. It’s still at least year out but I can genuinely see myself folding myself into this stress free beach front living. The last few days have been perfect weather-wise as I continue my boogie board education.

Las Lajas Beach

I even went on a walk to the elusive end of the Las Lajas beach. I’ve been coming to this beach for the better part of twenty years and have always taken early morning or evening walks down the beach trying to see what came next. The combination of tropical heat and very intrusive sand always stopped the treks before reaching that terminus. For those of you who’ve never been to Las Lajas you have to understand the beach seemingly goes on forever and any Descartian trained philosopher would question whether the unseen end even existed. I put all those questions to rest by finally reaching the river that marks the end of the beach. It’s where all ATV tracks go to die and wasn’t really that impressive but at least I’ve now checked that block.

Shell Gathering

End of Beach - Finally

My wife proposed the walk in an effort to collect shells for a craft project she has in mind. The beach walk is something of a tradition that dates back to the summers of my youth spent at York Beach, Maine accompanied by that worthy – the Cantankerous Friend. We’d often take a morning long walk down the entirety of Long Sands and not just to see what the female population was garbed in. Las Lajas shares a lot of similarities to Long Sands with great surf and a wide beach of packed sand at low tide. The one huge, and telling difference, is the water temperature. The Maine water is cold enough to take your breath away while Las Lajas is the warmest ocean water I’ve ever encountered.

Sunset Watching

It was Gearing up to be Another Epic Sunset

When a Lone Thunderstorm Cloud Inserted itself At Last Minute
You See - We Do Have Our Challenges Down here

We had another set of visitors yesterday which was short and altogether too much fun. One of the founding members of the Washington, DC chapter of the Panamanian Mafia and her husband stopped by for a quick late afternoon visit on their way back down the coast. They’re great friends and we never see enough of each other. We usually stay with them in Maryland when we visit D.C. so it was great seeing them in this new environment. They were in Panama for a long visit and were typically being pulled in a lot of directions by family and friends so we really appreciated them taking the time and braving the entry road to visit us. As I said in an earlier post – that’s going to be one of the very coolest parts of this condo – hosting friends and seeing them discover the paradise that is Las Lajas.

Our Most Welcome Visitors

We also walked down that entry road a couple hundred feet and patronized the Show Pony Hotel bar last night. We ended up sitting at the bar next to one of the young Canadian owners. He directed the bar tender to put the NCAA football championship game on for us while we enjoyed the company. Yet another boon to the location, having a neighborhood bar! I think in the coming years my children and their significant others will patronize this place while the grandparents pull babysitting duty back at the condo. We had five beers and a huge Pina Colada - final tab = $11!!!!!!

At the Show Pony Bar Last Night

And We Know Who had the Pina Colada

In my last post I wrote about dreading the return this week to find my driveway encased in ice as the residue of last week’s storm had the opportunity “bake” over my absence. There must be some sort of guardian angel looking out for me because late last night we received a text from our next door neighbor saying a snow blower fairy had visited our driveway and sent us this picture. Last year they didn’t have a snow blower and I repeatedly did their driveway for them so this was their way of thanking me. Completely and unbelievably AWESOME!

Saved - Although it Does Look a Mite Colder there

The Bad Cinema project count will remain at #88 out of 100, as I didn’t bring any of them with me.