We Made It!

What a trip! We checked our luggage bags all the way through to David, Panama. However, in Panama City we were required to go through customs and immigration. So, we stood by the luggage conveyor belt and there were no bags to be found. Confused and slightly anxious about the items possibly being lost, we found someone to ask about what the procedure was. We had never taken this route before, normally we get into Panama City too late to make a connection to David and end up taking an express bus for the rest of our trip. The man at the counter explained that if we did not find our bags, they probably were put on our next connection already. Crossing our fingers, we proceeded through customs without our bags. The good news is that we did find them at our final destination, but we were too tired to care at that point (since it had been 25 hours of travelling at this point.)

After negotiating the car rental and getting home we were greeted by the very healthy looking coffee trees and two new toucans. I have never seen a toucan in the wild before and wished that I had a camera close by. Hopefully I will get to take their pictures soon!

The next day we go down to the cell phone store and activate my phone and data plan. Unfortunately, it is the weekend and I think something went wrong. I have no data! :( So, I keep running up to my neighbor's house (friend and mentor) to use his wifi to send emails. He has been wonderful in helping us with our transition. If it were not for him, we would still be in a rental car that made my husband's SMART car almost look big. So now it is day 3 and we are the proud owners of truck. It even has a snorkel on it....not that we would use that, but it makes finding the truck in a parking lot easy to identify.

The people that we bought the truck from could not have been nicer! The office where we need to go and transfer the title is not open on the weekend, but they gave us the truck and told us to meet them at the office on Monday. We went to their house and met what looked like the whole extended family. They gave us extra parts, like new brake pads and other things that I had no idea what they were. They even handed us money back at the end to have something repaired, which they did not have to do, since we were buying the truck knowing that the part would need replacing at some point. They practiced their English and tried teaching us some Spanish. It was fun.

With the new truck in hand, we stopped by PriceSmart on the way home. PriceSmart is Costco, they even sell Kirkland brand items. We loaded up on supplies and are now working out the logistics of selling the coffee in U.S. Hopefully, I will be able to give more information on that later. All in all, we have been very busy! This week we have a roofer to talk to, car registration to figure out, lawyers and insurance agents to meet with....the list does not seem to get smaller. Oh yeah....and we REALLY need to work on our Spanish!