Lennox the Red Somali is upset that he won't be going with us.
Nine days until I leave for Panama!
As you can see from the photo above, I
am nowhere near the point of packed for My Big Fantastic Central American
Adventure. (Hey, it’s tough to track down all of those little travel-sized
bottles, folks!) Bless my travel-savvy significant other, Steven, for getting
this she-bang organized. He not only made all of the hotel reservations; he
typed them into an Excel spreadsheet and emailed me a copy. Yes, really. It’s
adorably engineer-ish of him — which, of course, he is. Given my (procrastinating)
druthers, I would have simply booked the flight and played the whole
hotel-finding bit by ear like I’ve always done before.
That would have been So. Very. Bad.
As it turns out, there’s a whole bunch
of stuff going on in Panama in January that really draws out the tourists, like
the Boquette Flower and Coffee Festival and the El Panama Jazz Festival, which are
apparently big deals. Any halfway decent place of lodging (my definition: with
a private bath) would have been booked. If we would have flown by the seat of
our pants, we probably would have ended up in some dreadful hostel where we
would have spent most of the day fretting about our belongings getting pilfered
and wiping other travelers’ unmentionable body ick out of the sink.
So this will be my first official
“organized” vacation since I did the senior-year-abroad in high school. I
actually have places to be and things to see. Coffee, chocolate, flowers, water
sports, and hopefully a lot of really good seafood will be involved. But I’m
not going to give you my itinerary; that’ll be my surprise to you — my friends
back home.
A few words about those weensy travel-sized
toiletries: I don’t know why I bother. The goal is to use everything up by the
end of the vacation, making the luggage a tad bit lighter. But I always end up
running out of shampoo/toothpaste/antiperspirant halfway through the trip, at
which point I end up purchasing a full size from a local drugstore and toting them
home anyway.
