Annalisa en Panamá

There are quirks about passing through the border between the U.S. and Panama that are different at each end and in each direction.  I figured I'd take notes so I could remember all this stuff myself, and also as a heads up for others planning the same trip (in a month, several of my kids will come visit me here!).   The trip to Seattle My trip started with the best possible kind of airplane delay story.  I checked in via the United app the night before, ordered an Uber for 6 o'clock,  and set my alarm for (ugh) 4 a.m.  When I woke up, I had a text from United saying my flight would be delayed two hours.  This meant four nice things: I could spend two more hours in bed. When I then canceled my Uber, I realized I'd actually ordered it for 6 p.m. not 6 a.m. (whoops)!  So I canceled and rescheduled for 8 a.m., successfully. When I did show up at the airport, United gifted me with a $15 breakfast voucher because of the "inconvenience" of the delay; th...

  Forecast:   89°/75° 50°/37°  (brrrrrr) Humidity :  84% 89% ( surprisingly similar) Sunrise   6:36 7:56 am. ,  Sunset   6:14 4:36 p.m. ( so much darker ) I'm staying with a Seattle-based mathematician at her home; she's loaned me a coat, hat, stripe-y mittens, scarf, sweater, and warm slippers.  All of this is very much appreciated, since I took very minimal amounts of winter clothes with me to Panama, and hence could take very few with me for this one-week jaunt to Washington State. A tree covered with moss, in a park that's along the walk between where I'm staying and the LightRail station. Being back in cold weather doesn't feel like as much of a change as the difference in light.  It's been glorious in Panama to wake up naturally with the sun every day; here, my internal clock still has me rising early (5 a.m.-ish local time), but the sun is sleeping in.  At the other end of the day, it's strange to see the world sink into end-o...

I'm traveling northward toward the math meetings in Seattle.  Just before I left Panama, though, I thought I'd record some things I find on the ground there that I don't see on the ground in the U.S.  Things like HUGE tree roots, and new (to me) mushrooms. Trees have large, exposed roots because the soil is rich, but shallow. On the root, a cool mushroom growth. Also, this Mama/daughter pair. And this NSFW lacy mushroom. I don't eat the mushrooms. There are these things that look from afar like white flowers, but when you get up close, it looks more like blades of grass that emanate from a white center and turn green at their edges.  These are all over, in lawns here,  much like clover is in Pennsylvania. And anthills, from Leaf Cutter ants. Once the leaves they've deposited in one anthill have fermented, they have to move to a new anthill.  So there are lots of these! There are a lot of speed bumps, used as a way (I'm sure) of enforcing speed limits.  They...

Pre Train Trip Musings Before we came to Panama, I read McCullough's amazing history,  The Path Between the Seas , aloud to my husband.  One of the small scenes in the book that struck me was how much early travelers enjoyed the scenic railway trip across the Isthmus; the railroad crossed Panama long, long before the canal did.  It was an important route for people heading to California during the Gold Rush, and it played a crucial role in the story of Panama's separation from Colombia. So, riding the train across Panama myself has been one of my "To Do" list items, right up there with transiting the country by boat.  Getting a train ticket was oddly harder to do; the ticket site seemed to go dark right after October (maybe because November is the month of almost daily National Holidays here). Even when the site came up again, tickets were only available a week or so in advance. Hence, there was great Jubilation on Christmas Eve when my husband saw that tickets were ...