The half-full moon was visible in dawn’s glow on Tuesday, February 18
While the marina was nice, it was isolated. Getting out was expensive, and given that Colon was a notoriously dangerous city, there weren’t many safe places to go within a reasonably close distance. Just as in Chiapas, we were feeling trapped and anxious to be free. So, like we did in Chiapas, we rented a car just so we could get out.
The mini-mart in the marina doubles as a car rental agency. The rental paperwork had to be done the day prior, so Christi did it on Monday while Eric and Keith were playing D & D. We were supposed to pick up the car at 0830, but because the mini-mart was busy, the clerk didn’t have a chance to finish up the last bit of paperwork and hand over the keys until closer to 0930. That delay actually turned out to be a blessing in the end.
The car rental was $80 per day, including insurance. In retrospect, instead of taking taxies/shuttle, we should have rented a car to visit the Castillo and Agua Verde on the same day, then gone grocery shopping afterwards. It would have made everything cheaper and easier. We also would have been able to purchase frozen foods, which wasn’t possible when taking the shuttle.
Once we had the car, we headed to Panama City, using the same toll road that we’d taken the day we’d gone to the airport. The toll was $2.30 each way (Panama uses U.S. money). The road ended right in the heart of downtown.
We had a few errands to run. Our first stop was a brewer’s supply shop for soda stream CO2 tanks, which was located near the entrance to the causeway and relatively close to Casco Viejo.
Panama City wasn’t master planned, and that was obvious by its strange road system. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology – a map on our phone providing verbal directions in real time — we made it to the store with no problems. We can’t imagine what a nightmare it would have been if we’d tried to drive in Panama City fifteen years ago. Given the disjointed streets and odd intersections, a paper map would have been a struggle to navigate with. Actually, taking our eyes off the road to look at a paper map would have been dangerous in and of itself, as traffic was heavy, there were a lot of lane merges, and there were quite a few times where we had to make wide right turns into the left lane of traffic so that we could make an immediate left turn or U turn. Back then, even the taxi drivers used to get lost! Here was the building the brewer’s supply shop was in.
And the view of some of the neighboring buildings.
We were in and out of the brewer’s supply shop within minutes. Next on the to-do list was to go to a dive shop to get a new regulator. Navigating there and buying the item also went smooth and fast.
Our plan was to go to a Mexican restaurant called Padron for lunch, but it was only 1130 and the restaurant didn’t open until noon. There was a place called Coffee Shots on the ground floor of an apartment tower across the street from the dive shop, so we got drinks to kill some time. The drinks were incredible — Christi thinks it was one of the best lattes she’s ever had.
View of the neighborhood from the coffee shop.
Finding Padron was challenging. We missed it the first time we drove by. We circled the block several more times and simply didn’t see it. The entire block was one auto repair shop and/or used car dealership after another, all housed in low buildings with fenced in lots –nothing looked like a restaurant!
There was one random residential high-rise in the middle of the block. Eventually, we figured out the restaurant was on the ground-floor of the high rise.
The food was good, but not great. It satisfied our Mexican craving, though! Next, we went back to Manolo for more churros. Almost as soon as we parked, it poured rain. We ate some churros in the café and also took some to-go. The rain stopped shortly after we left the restaurant, so our timing was pretty good.
Our last stop was Riva Smith grocery store. In the the first picture, the grocery store is the low building on the left that is lined with cars. The second photo is of the same street looking the opposite direction.
While Rey had been fine, it didn’t have a great selection on certain types of foods, such as dairy products. We’d brought a cooler bag with a freezer pack in it specifically so that we could stock up on refrigerated items. We also stocked up on things like specialty cookies that we hadn’t seen at Rey.
We decided we’d better leave Panama City before rush hour traffic started. Fortunately, Riva Smith was relatively close to the highway entrance. However, we had to go around the block twice before we figured out how to actually get onto the road — it turned out that we needed to be in the far right lane in order to make a wide left turn into the right lane so we could take an immediate right onto the highway. We’re still dubious that those maneuvers were legal, but its what all the other cars were doing.
We drove back to the marina, enjoying the beautiful, lush scenery along the highway. In the evening, Eric led another kids D & D session. Afterwards, the kids sang some karaoke.