Tropical Morning

Sunday, Dec. 7 2025

Panama City

From the overpass over Balboa Avenue to get to the excellent harbor walking trail. This place is BEAUTIFULLY tended!

I have always suffered from the “I don’t sleep well the first night” in a new place—but the curse has been broken! I hit that hotel bed last night and stumbled down, down, down in to the deepest sleep. This was my world record of sleep since I got this iWatch (which rates my sleep like the Russian judge). Oh em gee, I woke up like a Disney movie. Little birds were scrolling ribbons over my head and twittering in well-rested happiness. I felt reborn. Ahh!

The sun was coming up over my tiny view of ocean. (Panama City looks like Atlantic City in better days—or Las Vegas with more poverty on the fringes. I’m in the Massive Tall Buildings part of the city, with architecture competing to shock and astonish. But we flew in over miles and miles of shantytowns, with rusting red roofs, so these casino-like palaces aren’t telling the whole story..)

I can see ocean between two immense buildings on the other side of the street, and the faint and distant shapes of epicly huge tankers waiting for their turn in the locks. (My spell-checker says “epicly” isn’t a word. Does it prefer epically? Or does it just not like that I’m making up vocabulistics? Doesn’t seem to mind “epically.” But it hates “vocabulistics.” Is teasing my spell-checker an indication of an unbalanced mind?)

Where the hell was I??

The sun was coming up and the sisters started texting. Twig was ready to take her walk, which sounded good to me. That sun is evah so cheerful (all the more cheerful for knowing that northern Virginia is trapped in a polar vortex), but the humidity in Panama is legendary. The sooner we took our walk, the better in terms of heat and wetness. Scott, being far more sane about waking up too early, wanted more time, so we uncoupled as a group.

We look a lot more concerned than we actually were; we're both uneasy about selfies, so our instinct is to frown...

Walking with Twig (for me) is like saying “Sure, Gordon Ramsay—let’s cook something together!” The woman is FIT, and I was going to be the storm anchor holding her back…but she said I could set the pace and off we set. TOTAL VICTORY. She didn’t get to sweat as much as she wanted, I sweated more than I wanted, but we made a beautiful four-mile loop along the water on a fabulously wide (and deliciously FLAT!!) walking path with hundreds of very fit Panamanians. There was a 5K going on in which most people were running their dogs with them—delightful! All dogs are good dogs. I coo at all of them.

Walkers to the right, cyclists to the left. Generous size, everyone very good about staying out of the way, really a lovely place for a walk. Apropos of nothing, I note that some plastic surgeon in Panama is making a LOT of money for there are some impressive boobs (not pictured) on display on the jogging path and in the city...

Twig and I talked about how some people were clearly born to run and some were born to gut it out with determination. I attempted to channel my insanely-talented trainer, Barbara, as we considered who was running easily and well…and who needed Barbara. This is rude of us, especially as we were walking at a Pru-pace and had no number bibs pinned to the front of our jog bras…but it did pass the time!

Twig is so lovely, isn't she??

I also turned on the Merlin app for the thrill of finding out the names of the many, many birds we were hearing. Want to hear the list? Too bad; I’m telling you anyway:

Southern Beardless-Tyrannulet. (This sounds like a tyrannosaur. With good grooming habits. We saw no dinosaurs; I feel it’s important to point that out.) Blue-gray tanager. Palm tanager. Common Tody-Flycatcher. (What could possibly be common about a tody-flycatcher??) Tropical mockingbird. Great-tailed grackle. (This bird had a sassy attitude; I liked it a lot.) Tropical kingbird (which has a bright yellow belly; tiny and adorable). Orange-chinned parakeet. There was a tree FULL of these little birds; even I could see them. They were arguing with each other and flitting about; it was a huge community sing-along. Love love love!

I swear this is a tree full of parakeets. You can't actually see any in this photo, but I gave it a shot! I'm not a noted wildlife photographer, to say the very least!

So those are exotic, fun names, right?

We came back to the hotel, took showers, ate some breakfast, and are now lurking in our respective rooms until check-out at noon, at which point we intend to lurk in the hotel lobby. The Lindblad cruise will meet here at 2, so we’re loitering until then, virtuous in our post-sweat athleticism. (We’ll wedge some lunch in there somewhere.) Twig and I have been eyeing every other person in the hotel and nodding significantly to each other. If it’s an older white person—more if it’s an older white couple—without any heel in their footwear, we think “Oh, yeah. You’re going to be on the Lindblad/Nat Geo cruise with us.” The woman sitting next to us at breakfast—her name is Patsy—is a Lindbladian from New Mexico. She’s traveling with two friends who didn’t want to stay in the same hotel; we’ll meet them later. We were buddies right off; she said she was from Texas but had moved to New Mexico in self-defense. I suppose it’s not very surprising that most people on a naturalist-focused cruise are opposed to the current president’s administration. We are a like-minded group…

Panama is pretty!