Santa Fe and Los Islotes

July 2014

We have really settled into our new life here in Santa Fe and couldn't be happier with our living arrangements.  We have been able to keep our shopping trips to Santiago down to every two weeks which is great.  Peg is still making her yummy salsa and cooking delicious meals with our much limited fresh vegetable selection.  I have been trying my hand at pizza dough and even made a chicken pot pie with homemade crust.  We have had deliciously cheesy meals with all of our homemade cheese from Lucho and Janice; mozzarella, queso fresca, and a cheese she calls feta that is mixed with fresh basil.  They are fabulous people with a farm out in the country that is pretty much self-sustaining.  They even grow their own coffee.  We found a beautiful spot on the river where Calcite can swim and Zoe can sniff her way around.

Better picture of our kitchen

Dining area

Downtown Santa Fe

Beautiful river 

Calcite loves playing fetch in the river

Pristine water and no people

After being here three and half months we were both in desperate need of hair cuts.  Our land lady recommended a salon in downtown Santiago so we made the drive in, found parking and walked in with our prepared Spanish words: cut, shorter, layered etc.  We were taken in immediately, the stylists wet our hair down with a water bottle and cut away.  Peg's looks great and mine is a little shorter than I like, but a very good cut and they only charged us $5.35 each!

The drive to Santa Fe is so green

Beautiful view on the drive into Los Islotes

Zoe checking out Patricia's lot - this is what the rainy season does to the plants.

We have signed an agreement with our architect and will be making a trip into the city the first week of August to go over the first preliminary drawings.  We are very excited to get this process going.  We have been spending a lot of time working on the marketing materials for Los Islotes.  We spent two days at the property last week and two more this week putting up lot markers and making sure all of the lots are marked correctly.  We took the dogs and with the help of Karen (the project manager's wife) and Hermelinda (his assistant) we had a really great time driving around the property.  The Founder's Lodge construction is in full swing and Gary is working like crazy planting trees and putting pipes in the ground.  It is so fun watching our dream come to fruition.

Of course had to have a sold sign on our lot 

We made and posted over 70 of these signs all over Los Islotes

Welcome to the neighborhood Campbell's!

Stuff is happening on lot 131 

The Founder's Lodge is all graded!

The Los Islotes Project Manager Gary and his wife Karen live about 30 minutes from the project in a great house that overlooks the ocean.  They graciously let us stay in their guest room with our two furry canines while we are working so we don't have to drive all of the way back to Santa Fe every day.  It was fun getting to know them better and we are a lot more aware of the pitfalls of building an American style house in Panama.  For example, when all of the closets and cupboards are enclosed the lack of circulation causes a mildew and mold problem on everything including clothes and cooking utensils.  I think there will be a dehumidifier in our future.

Things grow so fast even in the potholes

US Shout Outs.... Alex and Jacob had a fabulous time in Romania sharing Jesus' love and made it home safe and sound.  Thanks to mom Leslie for the beautiful pictures taken with my birthday present!  Congratulations to Paul and Caitlin Harbison married July 26th.  Happy birthday to my niece Hadly!  As always missing our family and friends.

Our new home in Santa Fe

Santa Fe, Panama July 7, 2014

First I need to apologize in advance for the blurry pictures.  Our camera leaped off the counter and onto the concrete floor.  It hasn't been the same since.  We are trying to find a new one, but it hasn't happened yet.

It has been a crazy couple of weeks here in Panama.  After our last post we made a trip out to Los Islotes to be part of a tour group and practice our skills of showing the property to interested buyers.  We met the group in Santiago on Sunday morning and then headed out to the property for the tour and lunch.  It is always great to meet others that are interested in living here in Panama.  We had made arrangements to meet our attorney in Panama City on Monday morning thinking we could follow the group back to the city after the tour.  Lief had other ideas and asked if one of us would drive his rental car back to the city for him so he could fly home with his business partner and wife.  Being the agreeable sorts that we are, we said sure as long as we could still follow James (another Live and Invest employee) back to the city and our hotel.  As such we caravaned with James in front, Peg in 2nd in Lief''s rental car and me picking up the end in our truck.  As I mentioned before, driving is a sport here and it turns out James is the gold medal winner.  As a result I was a lane changing fool and literally kissed the ground when we arrived at the hotel.

Traffic on the way into the city

We spent the morning in the city with the attorney going to immigration to pick up our temporary residency visas and then to the US Embassy where we had to have our US Driver's Licenses validated - the first step in obtaining a Panamanian Driver's License.  In order to get into the Embassy you have to go through a security check point much like the airport except they take all of your electronics and keep them until you leave; cell phone, camera, computer, WiFi router etc.  Then you go in and wait with a very large number of people most of whom are Panamanian getting a travel visa so that they can travel to the US at a cost of $120, but it is good for 10 years.  They collected $40 from each of us, looked at our licenses and signed a piece of paper.  It took about an hour.  We then had the afternoon off so we went to the Live and Invest Overseas office and met with Lief about our new job.  We are going to be handling the property tours out at Los Islotes along with helping to update their marketing materials and website.  Very exciting for us.  We then spent a lovely quiet evening in the hotel with no chickens in sight or earshot.

On our way out of the city we decided to stop at the mall so we could buy a printer.  The Albrook Mall is huge and only about a 15 minute drive from our hotel.  Well let me just say this....  we never made it.  We drove through every neighborhood in the city and finally ended up on the toll road that goes right by the mall on its way to Colon, but doesn't have an exit.  Colon is on the Caribbean side of the country and hours in the wrong direction.  The toll booth lady took our fifty cents and laughed at us. She pointed off to her immediate left and we figured out enough of what she was trying to say which was....if you don't want to end up in Colon that is the only exit/escape.  Peg went through the toll booth and flew hard right to make the exit before getting run over by the cars to her right which wanted to go to Colon. We ended up back down town where we had started.  We decided to throw in the towel and head for home.  We somehow made it across the bridge over the canal, but then exited the Pan American Hwy by mistake and effectively drove on the frontage road through two cities (stop and go traffic) until finally making it back onto the Hwy.  It was good to be back to our little house in Pedasi.

We spent the rest of our last week collecting shells, enjoying the beach, spending time with our friends and making the most of our last three Spanish lessons.  We had decided it shouldn't take us too long to pack up so we spent Friday putting our worldly possessions back into our eight suitcases along with a few boxes.  On Saturday we loaded the truck with most of the belongings carefully wrapped in garbage bags (it is the rainy season) and made our first trip to Santa Fe.  We were pleasantly surprised as the landlady had completely out done herself.  She put up a wall between our house and the other one on the property and added mesh fencing around the bottom edge of the existing fence to prevent the animals from escaping.  The house is furnished very comfortably, has a second bedroom, a washing machine, two amazing portable room fans, a tv with satellite and even a little desk area with office supplies.  We couldn't have been more pleased.  More than twice the size of our Pedasi house for $200 less a month and it includes all utilities.  She even offered to clean our house once a week for no additional charge.

Another beautiful beach in Pedasi

Good shell hunting

Beautiful sunset from our living room in Pedasi.  One of the last.

We unloaded and headed back to Pedasi where we had a finalé dinner with friends.  On Sunday we took one final trip to the beach with the dogs, cleaned the house, and packed up the crew.  We left Pedasi a little sad, but excited about our new phase in the mountains.  It is so beautiful here.  The hour drive from Santiago to Santa Fe is just amazing.  We are surrounded by green and the weather is about 10 - 14 degrees cooler and almost always breezy. We spent a few days getting settled in and are really enjoying our new space. The town is much smaller than Pedasi and we have only seen two other gringos, but everyone is very friendly. We even have a couple that delivers the best tasting homemade yogurt and cheese that we have ever tasted.

Our new living room with a comfortable couch!  that is the $70 fan our landlady bought for us complete with a remote control.  She put one in the bedroom too.

View from our upstairs window in Santa Fe.  This is a cloudy day.  We will take another when it is sunny.

New fence added by the landlord

We even have a storage area.

Locking gate

Kitchen with microwave and oven.  Yippee

We have made several trips into Santiago and have found our new favorite grocery store, hardware store, appliance store and are slowly learning our way around downtown.  We also were able to successfully order and receive an on-line purchase.  We decided to attempt the final two steps of the driver's license process ourselves without the help of our attorney.  She couriered our passports, embassy validations and Panamanian Authentication (step 2) to Santiago.  The final two steps are to get our blood types certified and then to the Sertracen Office (DPS / DMV).  We find the ATTT approved clinic in downtown Santiago - no small feat without addresses.  We walk in with our prepared Spanish statement "Necessitamos tipajo de sangue" and were actually understood!!!!!  We hand her the copies of our passport, were called to the back less than five minutes later, poked in the finger, watched as the tech mixed our three drops of blood with three different solutions.  He then wrote down our blood type on a piece of paper.  We then went back to the waiting area for another five minutes where we were handed our two official typed up certifications and asked for $4 total - $2 each!  And this was in a clinic the size of most of your living rooms and completely full of patients.  We then drove to the Sertracen Office walked in, handed in our paperwork, took an eye test, a hearing test, paid $40 each and walked out with our actual driver's license (not a paper copy) less than a hour later.  We couldn't believe it.  And as fate would have it, we were actually stopped at a police check-point on the way back to Santa Fe where we were able to show him our brand new license and residency visa.  Not bad for a day's work.  

Black and White Squirrel

We are all legal!

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Pedasi, June 17, 2014

As we are nearing the end of our first three months of actually living the dream here in Panama I thought I would take time to move away from all of the glorious things we have found here (beautiful beaches, 50 cent beers, friendly people etc.) and talk about a few of the things that we never thought we would do in our lifetimes.

Chasing chickens through our house.  I so wish I could get a picture of this.  As we have mentioned before, our next door neighbor has a veritable farm including chickens.  When we first moved in the babies would come under the fence, so we blocked them with the dog crates much to Zoe's chagrin and haven't had more than the occasional mother hen in the yard since.  Well during the last week the adolescent chickens have started wandering into the yard.  The first one was caught in the jaws of the Labrador before we could stop her and subsequently devoured by the Beagle who now has acquired the taste for freshly killed chicken.  She paces the perimeter like a Sargent at arms waiting for her next victim.  Unfortunately they oblige her several times a day.  We hear the squaking and run out to capture her and then we have to catch the chicken and put it back over the fence.  Yesterday she chased one right into the house and it jumped onto the shelf and hid behind the pans.  They do not appreciate the rescue as much as I think they should.  Who knew they we so soft!

Perimeter secure.... for now.

Really!  Fresh from the grocery store with its head still attached.  Oh my.

Killing insects on a daily basis.  OK OK I know we moved to the rain forest, but the hundreds of different species of insects we have seen, relocated and killed since we have been here is unbelievable.  They seem to come in shifts.  There were the giant June bugs, the tiny bees, the colorful crickets, the scary waspish guys, cockroaches that need a saddle, flies and maggots by the pound, mosquitoes, ants in all sizes - tiny, small, medium, large and OMG, moths, noseeums, barelyseeums, and the don'twannaseeums.  I have never seen so many different kinds of bugs in my life.  Our gardener and now friend Einar was enjoying a few cervesas with us after his weed-eating the other night and Peg shows him a nest of itty bitty bees in our backyard.  He quickly before we could stop him, takes a plastic bag wraps it around the nest and ties it off. Then he makes the universal sign for choking complete with sound effects.  It turns out they don't die as quickly as we hoped.  We erroneously put the bag in our kitchen trash can and when we opened it a couple of hours later we had bees frantically flying around the house!  I won't even mention the gecko droppings!

Sticky plate for catching flies after one day.

Not a great picture, but those red things are crickets.

Having to sweep the beds and walls.  Not only do we have to sweep the floors every day at least once, but we have to sweep the walls, window sills and occasionally the bed!  When I did a thorough clean on Sunday I was amazed by the life forms we had unknowingly been supporting.

Utilities are optional.  Much of the electricity here in Panama is hydroelectric and since the rainy season came late and slow this year the entire country is required to have rolling black-outs that last anywhere from an hour to eight hours.  And when the electricity is out, so is the water and the igniters on the stove.  We live in front of portable fans so this can be torturous when there is no breeze.  Our solution is a trip to the beach... not too shabby!

No power, no water, no problem!

Guess which can the TP goes in?

Driving is a blood-sport.  I am sure we have mentioned before that the driving "style" here in Panama is very Central American - not a surprise I guess.  There are no rules to follow except this... you can stop your car anywhere, anytime and put your flashers on.  The rest of the drivers will simply go into oncoming traffic to go around without hesitation.  Stop signs are optional.  Speed limits aren't really necessary since the Panamanians are rarely in a hurry which means that the few that are will be recklessly passing the others. And when driving down a two-lane road the proper placement of your vehicle is right down the middle!

We followed these piggies to the slaughterhouse!

They call it the rainy season for a reason.  It doesn't rain all of the time, but when it does... carry a change of clothes.  When I moved to Texas I couldn't believe how hard it could rain, well this is one thing that is not bigger in Texas.  There is so much water flowing through the streets that a car size pothole can literally develop overnight.  It is filled with brown water so you really never know how deep it is.  Also since it rains every day at some point, it makes it really hard to do laundry.  We washed our beach stuff out and hung it on the line where it remained soaking wet for a solid week.  The locals seem to know when it is going to rain ahead of time, but they don't share that information with us.

That rug has been wet for three days.

Fruit and vegetables are scarce but delicious.  There are few vegetables that you can get every day, but what you do get is amazingly fresh.  It is a whole new experience planning meals.  We have found that it is just better to hit the Chino every day to see what they have and then plan from there.  We do get deliciously fresh avocados, mangoes, star fruit etc. from our neighbors and Peg makes the best salsa ever with the fresh tomatoes, peppers and jalepiños.

Platanos - twice fried plantains - Delicious!  We may never eat french fries again.

Fresh tomatoes and avocados YUMMY

Need I say more?

We have really enjoyed our time here in Pedasi.  We will miss our new friends, our fabulous Spanish teacher, and the beautiful quiet beaches.  Our little house has taught us some invaluable lessons for our new home. Screens on every window, back up generator and water supply a must, air conditioning in every room necessary, concrete floors are amazing, outdoor shower and sink very useful, closets and cupboards are missed, ice maker not a luxury, and roosters are not your friend.

Our friend Karen's homemade bread will be missed!

Dania - the best Spanish teacher in the world!

Enjoying Panama

June 2014, Pedasi

Our friend and lead salesman for Los Islotes Louis let us know that he was bringing a couple interested in the property out for the weekend along with his family.  Daphne, Louis'wife speaks fluent Spanish so we thought we could use her help in the search for a rental house.  We drove down the west side of peninsula without much luck.  We arranged to have a house-sitter so we could spend the night at the Torio Cabañas hoping that the owner might have some insight into a rental house in the area.  Come to find out there really aren't any available houses in the area.  After putting out as many feelers as possible, we decided to spend the day with Louis and his family and visit Los Islotes.  He was showing the property to Tony and Claudia a fabulous couple from Ohio.  We had a really fun day driving around the property and looking at the available lots and talking about the vision.

Louis, Daphne and their beautiful daughters

Sold!  Lot 131

As it turned out Tony and Claudia wanted to visit Pedasi, so after a full day at the property they followed us home where they stayed at Casita Margarita another great B & B in town.  We made plans to go with them to Isla Iguana an island off the coast here in Pedasi which is designated as an iguana and frigate sanctuary.  The hotel packed us a lunch and rented us chairs and snorkel gear for the day.  It is about a 30 minute boat ride out to the island which has a beautiful white sand beach and great snorkeling.  It was high tide when we returned to the main land from Isla Iguana and the waves are too large to beach the boat where we parked to leave for the trip.  Irvin, our captain took us into a cool little river filled with mangroves.  Turns out it is called Rio Pedasi.  Irvin parked the boat at a little dock where his friend is there to pick us up and take us back to our truck.  We all jumped in the back, along with Irvin and got to ride like Panamanians back to our truck.  Most pick-ups you pass on the road are loaded with Panamanians in the back, standing up.  The ratio of cars to people is small so everyone gives their amigos rides.  It was fun to feel like part of the community.  It was so nice to spend a day enjoying Panama!  We just kept looking at each other and saying "we live here".  It was great fun getting to know Tony and Claudia and we look forward to seeing them next time.

Peg enjoying a cerveza panamanian style

The boat to Isla Iguana

Just beautiful - Isla Iguana

New friends Claudia and Tony

We decided to expand our search for a rental house to the area of Santa Fe a city on the north side of Santiago which is opposite of Los Islotes, but still a lot closer than Pedasi.  There was an ad on Craig's List for a rental there that sounded great, but there was some weird postings on the internet saying that the property was in the middle of a legal dispute.  We emailed back and forth and it turns out the owner has a crazy ex-wife who is making his life hell.  He is leery of renting to us with two cats and sends us on to a real estate agent in town who might be able to help us.  We reach out to them and decide to drive out there for a look.  It is a solid hour drive from Santiago to Santa Fe on a beautiful road through the mountains.  The town of Santa Fe is about the size of Pedasi, but with a much smaller ex-pat community.  It is absolutely beautiful.  Peg was singing "the hills are alive with the sound of music..." .  We are able to meet with the agent and he shows us a duplex that is just being finished and they are willing to rent it to us and our menagerie for $450 a month  It is a two story house with two bedrooms, satellite TV, a washing machine, oven, microwave and the rent includes all of the utilities, even the Satellite.  Plus, if we understood correctly we think the owner is going to come and clean once a week as part of the rent.  We took a couple of hours to drive around the town and check out the rivers in the area and then decided to go ahead and take it.  It will be different living in the mountains, but we figure that once our house is built we will be back at the beach permanently.  

A view of the Santa Fe hills from the real estate office.  That's our truck in the parking lot who we have affectionately named "Junior"

So far so good in the budget area.  We are able to live very comfortably on our fixed income and add to our savings as well.  This is a relief after living in the red during our RV adventure.  No blog would be complete without a Zoe update!  She has become quite the little fisherdog.  She loves to hang out in the pools and chase the little fish.  Adorable!

Zoe fishing

Our favorite swimming hole "flatrock pool"

The view from out from "flatrock pool"

 The rainy season is definitely upon us and it rains pretty much every day at one time or another.  Our little house has come into full bloom.

These just popped up on the side of the house

Pretty flowers

Hope this finds everyone back home doing well.  Keep in touch!