Monday, 2:07pm
As of right now, Cindra and I are flying out at 7am from JFK to Miami to catch a flight to Panama City. We’re going to meet up with friends of mine that have been traveling around the world for the past 9 months. JFK started runway construction and that will likely cause delays up to an hour for departing flights leaving us a little window to catch that connector into Panama City.
Once we arrive we have to find a flight to Bocas Del Toro where our friends have rented a house for the month. This will be the first real vacation I’ve had since Holly and I escaped to the Bahamas two years ago and the FIRST time Cindra and I will attempt to travel together (aside from that one time in September when I broke my ankle in three places). We have no plan, well, we have a loose plan and the loose plan as it stands is to buy tickets to Bocas when we get to Panama City. Pardon me for having an Ellen Griswold moment here but, CLARK! Why did you make these arrangements sooner?! Honey, it’s fine where is your sense of adventure? Kids? Audrey, Russ this is fun right?
But Russ’ head is in Kathleen Turner’s Thee Joan Wilders’ bosom in Romancing The Stone and so am I. I was planning on traveling in white pants and deck shoes but now I should probably take a machete because the way my back-country Michael “Jake” Douglass of a girlfriend likes to travel, we’re going to wind up on a bus with donkeys and chickens that hugs the side of a cliff at 60 miles an hour.
I think I’ve convinced her to stay in Panama City for the night until we can get a flight to the island first thing on Wednesday, hopefully! I cannot get the websites to either regional airline to work. One rejects the reservation every time and I have to use the Google translator because I can’t even lick the native tongue. The other only allows us to return on July 10th of this year. Which at this point seems like heaven compared to the near 18 hours of travel we’ll endure to drop our bags for 72 hours.
Complaining, I know, I’m not even paying for this. There is just something in the lack of planning that reminds me of the drive-in, oh and did I mention that it’s supposed to be muggy and raining the ENTIRE time we are there? I didn’t? Well, add that into the mix and we’ve got the beginning of a really bad 80s adventure movie with one crazy AIDS activist world traveler and a neurotic New York Jew.
On this Holiday Road we might be skipping right over The Jewel of the Nile and headed straight for the War of the Roses.
P.S. I know that Joan Wilder went to Cartagena, Columbia rescue her sister and not Panama City. After this trip I will have been to both, I’ll let you know which is better spot to be kidnapped in, though right now you’d be hard pressed to find a better spot than off the coast of Somalia. But then you need a sailboat and boat shoes…
