On the road again....

WARNING: REALLY, AND I MEAN REALLY LONG POST AHEAD OF YOU.

So Jase and I have this "thing" where we always sing "On the road again....can't wait to get on the road again" because it seems like we literally are always "On the road again.." So we officially have chosen that as our life's theme song" so you can assume whenever we are headed anywhere we are definitely singing that song to each other. 

Alright so let's go clear back to March and talk about our Spring Break trip with the Langstons to
P A N A M A. OMG this trip was UNREAL. Best 9 days of my life. We had a blast exploring beautiful Panama, I still am dreaming about going back. We got a killer deal on flights, so if you ever are wanting to go...watch the prices of flights because seriously it was the best deal and there is not need to spend a fortune to fly there.

Here's a recap of what we did all week (:

Friday night we headed to Vegas to stay the night and get up for our EARLY flight Saturday morning. Man it was rough getting up...BUT the good news was that our flight wasn't full so we all got our own row to lay down on and sleep. HEAVEN RIGHT?! PLUS we got 2 free meals on the flight. Bonus. EVERYONE USE COPA AIRLINES. The plane was super nice, free meals, and free TV, music and videos. They really impressed me and set the standard real high for an airline.

Once we arrived in Panama City we took a bus to get our rental card. Bad news...the rental car company wasn't there so it took a while to get that figured out, but we ended up getting the van we rented for the week, so all is good.

We headed to the hotel to get settled and then starting walking to the restaurants and shops that we were told were less than a mile down the pathway. Yeah, there weren't any places....we were told wrong. But it was fun to walk around that evening and we got to enjoy the view of The Bridge of Americas that was right outside our hotel.  We eventually found a place we could each, which was good because we were starving by this point. We grabbed some dinner then headed out to the market to get some snacks for the week. On our way back we decided to drive to the temple...our GPS on our phones did not want to cooperate for us so driving around Panama City was crazy. We were just using the little blue dot and trying to use that to get us around but MAN, we were making U-turn after U-turn trying to figure that city out. I honestly was worried for us at that point and thought..."If it's like this all week..I'd rather just stay in Panama City the whole time". I thought we would never find our way around that country. Luckily outside of the city it was much easier to navigate. We never found the temple that night, only an LDS church that was in the G H E T T O in the middle of a neighborhood. So we gave up and headed back to the hotel to catch some Zzzz's.

 Jordan was on a different flight from us (he wasn't planning on coming because he thought his Spring Break was the following week and didn't want to miss school...come to find out it was the same week so he booked his flights later than us) so he took a taxi at like 2 in the morning to the hotel to meet up with us.

Sunday we got up, had some breakfast then headed to find the Panama Canal. GUYS...not knowing Spanish is tricky when you are in a Spanish speaking country. Jase, Jordan and Kaden know some of the basics but that is it. It was an adventure for sure. We thought we headed the right way to the canal but just our luck...we were wrong. We tried to ask locals for instructions but that was a joke. Finally a guy drew us a map and by some miracle we were able to find our way to the Panama Canal. Thank goodness everyone was patient during all of this. It was quite the struggle at first but we survived.

The Panama Canal is crazy cool. Like honestly, that thing saves SO MUCH TIME and the engineering behind it is so interesting. Definitely worth seeing. It was perfect timing because right after we got out of the video presentation, there was a boat coming through. Such a cool experience to watch how it all works.

 

 

After that we attempted to find the temple again. I looked it up on my laptop at the hotel and got instructions that way. (MUCH MORE ACCURATE) It was close to the canal so it worked out well. It was so beautiful. You are just driving around dirty Panama City and then you turn on a street and drive up to this AMAZING building. It's so out of place, yet in the perfect location.

The boys were having a blast catching Jase for some reason....

Once we were done with that, we geared up for our drive to Boca Chica. All of us pretty much crashed during the car ride. We probably stopped and got McDonald's on the way. We ate WAY TOO MCDONALD'S on this trip. I am sick just thinking about it. We were so disgusting but it was like the only option we had on our long drives. The worst is that their menu had like 5 items so everytime we ate there we had the same thing, and I was just SO OVER IT. The boys were in heaven (ew).

The fun thing about Boca Chica was that we had to take a water taxi to the island we were staying on that night. It was so cool. When we pulled up to our place we realized there was the looooooooongest staircase ever that we had to pack all of our luggage up. HOLY WORKOUT! But sooooo worth it. We stayed in the coolest little bungalow type places...what an experience. So many funny things happened that night. Kaden couldn't sleep because he was worried about a baby lizard that had crawled on the wall by his bed, we ordered $7 burrito's for dinner and they were for sure the frozen burritos you get at the grocery store, Jordan broke all trust that I had in him by looking me in the eyes and telling me he was not the Mafia, AND the best part...I locked Jase, Jordan, Kaden and I out of our room. *sigh* We sat and knocked on a door for a solid 30 minutes trying to get the owners attention. No luck. We did not know what we were going to do. Finally I walked down a few rooms and found the guy who owned it (miracle) and he came and unlocked it. We had been knocking on the wrong door the entire time.

 We woke up the next day and it was the coolest thing, there were a few monkeys swinging around in the trees literally right outside our room. Janelle had said she had read that we would see them and we all gave her a hard time saying "sure, that's what all places say...." but sure enough there were real life monkeys swinging right in front of us. It was really amazing! (: After breakfast we got ready for the next adventure. We had rented a boat that was our chauffeur for the day. We started at a Private Beach...this was like a real Private Beach. Not one other person was on this island and the white sand was GORGEOUS. Probably in my top 3 things we did this trip. We played baseball, swam, and even cracked open coconuts and ate them. Such a relaxing/fun experience. We headed to the next island where there were people and we all found us a place to lay down in the shade and take a nap. It was heaven.

 

The dreaded staircase

 

That was where we stayed on the top of the hill

 Once we got back we packed up and took the water taxi back to the main island and started our journey to Baquette. Janelle referred to this town as the "park city" of Panama. More tourists are here and it's a nice little town.

We had to get up early the next morning so we could go white water rafting. There was a bit of a drive to get to the river.  Jase and I split from the fam and joined a group of 4 others. Of course we had a splashing war the entire time between the Langston's raft and ours. Our poor new friends didn't know what they were getting themselves into...

We went to a little local Bistro for dinner that night and got some ice cream afterwards. It was a beautiful little place.

We were supposed to drive to the Boca Islands that night but the owner of the hotel let us know they stop the water taxi's just before dark so we stayed here an extra night and got up the next morning to drive to the Boca Islands. Since we were there for the night we walked to the little market a block or two down from our hotel and spent $2 on some sodas and Ritz cheese crackers (so cheap), then the boys stayed up watching tv and I hit the sack.

Wednesday we made it to the Boca Islands! This is where we would be for the rest of the week until we headed back to Panama City. Once we got there we did a tour that took us first to Starfish Beach. It was raining like crazy (still super warm). We were drenched before we even got to the beach. We hung out and swam and the boys all dove for starfish. You aren't supposed to take them out of the water but we were rebels and took them out for a few seconds, just long enough to snap some pics with the beautiful creatures. I've never seen so many starfish is so many shapes and sizes. They were so cool. 5 stars for Starfish Beach ***** We met a little friend at the beach. His name was Paulo. He saw my phone and kept touching it so I started talking to him and then we became BFF's. He followed us around for a while, then he disappeared for a bit. Next thing we new, he was in the water with us swimming in his underwear. He spoke zero English but was the sweetest little boy. After the beach we went out to Dolphin Bay to see the wild Dolphins. It was really quite the site. We saw a few pairs of dolphins (or maybe it was the same pair, different location...who knows) and we could have just watched them forever. They even came right up in front of the boat one time. For dinner we went back into town (everything was just on this small little island that you could walk all the way around) and had some more pizza for dinner.

**Side note** Wednesday after our 1st tour, we put a deposit down with the same guy to take us on a tour on Thursday.....ya he never showed up Thursday morning! Moral of the story...never pay for something in advance there, you never know who you can and can't trust! They are good people over there but you always have the ones you can't trust. 

Jase put the goggles on because we were getting his so hard with the rain on our boat ride

Starfish Beach...Gorgeous right??

Thursday we went to Red Frog Beach and had a little picnic. On the way out we saw a bunch of sloths chilling in the trees that are in the middle of the ocean. Sloths are THE WEIRDEST animal ever. They literally move SO SLOW. I'm not sure why we don't say "as slow as a sloth" instead of a turtle. They are the most interesting animal I've ever seen (and ugly). After our picnic we went Ziplining in the rainforest. OH MY GOSH IT WAS SO BEAUTIFUL! Like it can't get much prettier than that. It was amazing! We had a lot of fun! On our way back we went through a really shallow part of the ocean and there were hundreds of starfish you could see through the water. I'm telling ya, SO MUCH BEAUTY IN PANAMA! You have to go see for yourself!

 

 

Jordan left his shoes at our hotel and it was R O C K Y

Friday we went to another isaland that was a National Park called Coya Zapatillas. Again it was DOWNPOURING at first. We walked all around the island and got drenched. We put our towels over us and they were sopping wet. Nothing that will stop us from having a good time though. We sat and let the rain pass as we had a picnic under a pavilion. Once it cleared up we went and laid out on the dock and got FRIED. We all didn't think we were getting much sun but we were bright red by the end of the day. On the way back we stopped at a place to snorkel and it was so beautiful. The coral was so many fun colors. Just straight up beautiful. That day was Jordan's birthday so we went out for dinner and celebrated him turning 23! We were told to try Arroz con pollo and patacones, which we did and I'll give them both 2 thumbs up! Definitely try those if you ever find yourselves in Panama! I am actually craving that now that I'm talking about it! (Way better than the McDonalds we had been eating in previous days...thank goodness there was no McDonalds on the islands)

Shelter from the rain

Saturday we woke up early and made the drive back to Panama City. We got a lot of napping and reading time in on the drive back. We went out and got some dinner at a rotisserie chicken place (YUM) and then headed to the hotel and zonked. We were so beat from all the fun we had all week.

Sunday we got up and had breakfast, the boys went and played basketball at the courts across the street. It was SO STINKING HOT so they didn't last too long. They came back and showered then we went and got some frozen yogurt. Then later that afternoon we headed back to the airport to head back to the states.

 What an amazing week we had! Panama is truly beautiful and I hope to make it back there someday! If anyone wants to go, just let us know....I'm sure we would be up for being your tour guides (; Jase and I kept saying that we need to move there and live the "simple life". WHAT AN AWESOME EXPERIENCE WE HAD, one we will never forget...that is for sure!