Tag Archives: Exploring

Days 1 and 2 – Asheville and Watumpka, Alabama

Y’all. We made it to Alabama.

So we decided to leave a day early and make a stop in Asheville to see my folks and break up the drive a bit more. I took the first driving shift…and made it as far as Hickory before ceding control to Eric. I suppose it doesn’t bode well that I started to get tired of driving after 3 hours. Hmm.

Before we left Raleigh, we borrowed a soft-sided rooftop case thing for the car from some friends. I asked Eric within the first hour or so if the bag was waterproof. “Yep!” he said, then followed up with a “well, I think they call it water resistant.” Now I remember from my days with my first little Timex watch that water resistant and waterproof are NOT the same thing, but I kept my mouth shut b/c there was nothing we could do about it right then. Sure enough, it started to rain just outside of Asheville.

You see where this is going, I’m sure. The bag and some of the things in it were soaked…but no harm done. Eric was sweet enough to get everything out of it in the pouring rain, and after taking my dad up on his offer of a beer and laying down with his puppies for a bit, he determined that our first stop this morning would be to REI to invest in a hardcover cargo box.

 

So this was us this morning:

Nothing like a nice walk by the Chick-fil-A

Eric drove the five or so hours to Auburn, making stops along the way for the dogs. Neither of us had been to Alabama prior to today, so it was kinda cool to experience a new state together…the first of many to come. We first drove by the house my mom lived in during high school and where my parents had their wedding reception. Kinda cool to see after seeing all those OLD pictures.

My parents were driving down to Florida today to see my sister’s family, so we texted back and forth throughout the day, updating each other on our locations. It was cool to hear her stories from her days in Auburn.

Just one hour further down the road, we made our stop for the night in…not Montgomery…but Watumpka, Alabama. Where? Exactly. We got here just after sunset, so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow for better pictures. It’s a cool place though a tad…rustic. I mean, I can’t say much – it has a Keurig for goodness sakes – but it’s pretty chilly while we wait for the wood stove to heat this giant open room enclosed on 3 sides with windows. But beautiful! The one thing that I’m not too keen on is the fact that the bathroom is OUTSIDE. I mean, it’s sorta attached-ish to the house, but we’ll definitely have to venture outside in the cold to get to the facilities. Luckily, there’s a space heater in there, but gosh, those things make me nervous, especially when I’m staying inside a large wooden structure.

So sorry for the sideways pics, but gosh – I’ve been fighting with WordPress for 30 minutes on them and finally decided that y’all can manage turning your head or phone or whatever.

Main part of the house to the left, bathroom and shower on the right.
The view of the cabin from the “parking lot” below.
The dogs weren’t sure where we were leaving them when we went to dinner.
View of the front porch from the main room.
The woodstove! And check out the windows!

Tomorrow: on to New Orleans!

And now, here it is, your moment of zen.

 

Power outage, our community, and more kiting.

By the time our guests left on Sunday afternoon, our power and water had gone out. There is no great story here. We were just without power and water all afternoon and evening. We ate leftovers for dinner by candlelight – more spooky than romantic, given the spiders and creepy-crawlers around, then went for a short drive around town to see who had electricity. Then…what else were we going to do? We fell asleep.

Eating leftover chorizo and yogurt in the dark

On Monday and Tuesday, I started to get into a routine. I did some writing each morning poolside, then yoga, then dishes. On Monday I also took a walk to explore the neighborhood, as it were. Here are a few pics from that walk, to give you an idea of what’s around. These aren’t necessarily representative of Punta Chame as a whole, but rather just things I thought were interesting.

Both evenings we went down to Machete. The wind was too strong for Eric’s kite size (10 m) on Monday evening, so we just got drinks at the bar and sat on the beach to watch the sunset kiters…my favorite thing ever. On Tuesday, we walked the 1.4 miles to Machete together, and Eric went out in a mass of 25 or so kites and did a great job in all the traffic! I sat down with Itzick and Roco for a bit, and Itzick commented on how well Eric was doing. Then both Itzick and I took pictures of the bulldog in the sunset b/c, well, Roco’s awesome.

 

 

Itzick and Roco – can’t tell if Eric’s in the background or not. Sometimes it’s hard to tell at sunset.

 

 

Carnavales!

We’ve done a lot of just living life here recently, hence the less frequent blog posts.  I did, however, fail to fill you in on Carnavales!  So here you go…

We decided to do it up right this year since I was sick and couldn’t do much last year at this time.  We ended up spending two nights in Las Tablas, a small town that is famous for having the biggest and most ridiculous Carnaval celebration.  It’s about a 3.5 hour drive from the city.

Map showing Las Tablas

We actually stayed in an even smaller town about 5 min from Las Tablas called Santo Domingo.  The thing is, you have to book hotels months and months in advance if you want to be in Las Tablas for Carnavales.  We did not.  But, we really lucked out.  We stayed at a nice B&B in a very clean room within walking distance of Santo Domingo’s town square.  Of course, this meant that we were listening to partying until all hours of the night…and to the drums that started up at 4 am and continued for a couple of house…but hey, all in the spirit of the celebration, right?  Meh…it was loud.  I’m old.

So when we got into town around 4 pm, we decided to head to Las Tablas and walk around to get a feel for things.  What we found was this:

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Amazingly disgusting.  I have never smelled smells like that before…or at least not that combination of smells and not at that intensity.  The gutters were completely filled with beer cans and trash.  We caught several people peeing behind houses or…you know…kinda wherever.  Actually, my friend Mahalia, when asked whether she was going to Las Tablas, responded that she preferred not to smell pee for 4 days straight.  Lovely.  But hey, what do you expect?  It’s a huge 4 day party!

So anyway, we arrived around 4 to find the streets pretty dead.  It turns out that people are out all morning and early afternoon, then go home from about 4 until 7 or 8 to rest and eat dinner.  Then they come out again and play drums all night right by the window of the place we stayed.  Okay, not really, but it was close.  We got the whole experience.

So one big thing about Carnavales in Panamá are the culecos.  As you might imagine, it’s pretty flippin’ hot during the day b/c 1) it’s Panamá and it’s always hot, and 2) it’s our summer right now.  So the towns will bring out huge trucks filled with water and hose down the crowd from time to time.  You’re supposed to expect to get wet…it’s just going to happen.  As we walked down the street that first day, we passed by a small house where an old (80’s at least) woman was spraying people with one of those noodle-looking pool toys that squirts out a ton of water.  Eric says he’d call it a water cannon.  But the best part was that since most people had gone home to rest, she just targeted this one poor guy who was obviously wasted, over it, and wanting to be home.  He was shocked and mad…and she cracked up!  We did too…as we made our way to the opposite side of the street.

And this girl was nothing but class…or something.
Drunk and passed out on the street…at 4 pm.
Guy peeing next to a house…one of several public urinators of the weekend.

On our first night, the town ran out of water.  Like, the whole town.  Apparently that happens when you spray down all of your residents and visitors all day long.  Luckily, the hostel where we stayed was able to get a water truck to refill their tank by maybe 11 am the next morning.  They also made arrangements with a woman down the road to feed us breakfast.  This is what the place looked like:

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Breakfast restaurant

It was great!  We had some chorizo and yuca and coffee while we chatted with a retired couple who had just moved down from somewhere in the midwest and an Australian couple.  It was interesting to hear their stories and experiences and share some of ours.  Listening to the American couple made me think of our first few weeks here and how much we’ve learned about the country and culture since then.  We also wondered why in the world they would move to Las Tablas, of all places, because it is such a small town and it’s neither on the beach nor in the mountains.  Kinda a stuck-in-the-middle kinda spot.  The Australian couple had been traveling for years.  Evidently they will spend several months to a year in one country, then move on to the next.  Colombia was next on their list.  Old hippie types…pretty cool.

Float
What happens to floats after they’re used: They go in someone’s backyard.
Another float.
Spontaneous singing and drum playing in the town square.

So…the celebration.  We decided not to go back to Las Tablas, but rather to hang out in Santo Domingo.  This way we could easily go back and forth to the hotel for beverages and bathrooms and didn’t have to worry about driving or looking for a taxi.  It was still a huge party.  The floats were particularly impressive, as you can see above.

They also select a Queen from both Calle Arriba (roughly translated as “uptown”) and Calle Abajo (downtown), and each of those women (18-22ish years old) lead the parade of the Polleras, the traditional Panamanian dress that you can see in the photos below.  Maybe a hundred women, from tiny kids to elderly ladies, dressed up in their polleras (which can cost upwards of $60,000 if it’s intricate and you add in the cost of jewelry and shoes) and walked around the square while men played the drums.

We also had the opportunity to drive down to Playa Venao, which we had heard was beautiful.  We only stopped there for maybe 45 min.  It was pretty because it was in a little cove, but it wasn’t super amazing compared to some of the beaches in Panamá.  Still glad we went though.

Playa Venao