Today is January 5th, 2022 and Denise and I are off flying again even though the Covid world would have us idling in our homes. The Omnicron version of the Covid virus, per the news, is catching on pretty good. However, it appears that with each new strain, the symptoms become less and less problematic. Anyway…we are off and hope to get back home Covid free.
We left for the SLC airport at 5:15 AM. Our first attempt at a flight out of SLC was at 6:45 AM to IAH (Houston). Unfortunately, a crew member did not show up for work and suddenly this flight became delayed. The next flight to Houston was to leave at 9:15 AM. In reality, this delay turned out to be a blessing. I don’t think there were seats for us to get on the 6:45 AM flight. And the same was true for the 9:15 AM flight. So people started re-routing off of the 6:45 flight. Around 8 AM, after thinking that it was going to cancel, they announced that it was going to leave at 10:15 AM. The good news, there were now lots of seats. The bad news, it was scheduled to land when our flight to PTY (Panama City) was to leave. We’d miss it. So we went to the gate of the 9:15 flight and had the agent move us to that flight in hopes there would be 2 seats. It turns out….there was only 1 seat. So we told the agent to push us back to the delayed flight. But as we were walking to the gate, we noticed that it had been moved up to 9:45 AM for departure…which gave us some life in making our connecting flight. We’d have 30 minutes to do the OJ sprint through the airport. And that’s exactly what happened. We arrived at the gate in IAH at 1:40 and then we sprinted a very long ways (with a train in between) to go from Terminal B to Terminal C. We arrived at our gate, they handed us two seats on the same row with no one between us and we got in line and boarded the plane. I’m now writing this on the plane going ‘Whew…another travel day adventure!’. We are supposed to land in Panama City around 7:30 PM their time (Eastern). We plan to use Uber to get to our hotel on the Panama Canal. More to come once we arrive as hailing cabs\Ubers at these Central\South American airports can be an adventure sometimes.
Well, hailing an Uber was a bit of an adventure. As is the case in most of these airports, you are bombarded by Taxi Drivers. They always start high and then go down a bit. But this time I showed one of them what Uber was going to cost…which was about half. So I went ahead and hailed an Uber. The app says to meet them at lane 15 in the parking lot. However, the first guy never arrived there and kept saying #5. Well…I don’t think he was in the parking lot as I went to aisle 5. I think he was at the arrival door 5. Anyway, he canceled on us. The second one did show up fine and we ended up finding him. It was a good 25 minute ride to get to our hotel which is on the opposite side of the downtown area of Panama City. It was fun conversing in Spanish with the driver as he explained why the city was still lit up in Christmas lights. Apparently they celebrate the holidays until January 6th. This has something to do with the wise men coming to see the baby Jesus. He also said on the 9th of January, it is a national holiday to honor those who died in building the Panama Canal. At midnight the night before, all bars must close and no alcohol can be purchased (and drank) until the 10th mid-day. Also, no loud crazy music can be played…only soft ‘romantic’ music. The 9th is the day we want to come home. He says it will be an easy ride to the airport that day as no one is out doing anything.
Our hotel is right on the Panama Canal (Radisson Hotel). We have a lovely view of it and the 3 swimming pools below us. But it is away from the city and many of the necessities we might need such as a market for food and stuff. But we will figure it out. After getting checked in, we went to the TGI Fridays restaurant that is attached to the hotel for some food since all we’ve had is plane cookies and some cheese and salami that I brought from home.
Tomorrow, touring begins. We hope to go to Miraflores Locks and the museum there that gives a good overview of the construction of the canal. We then have a temple appointment scheduled for 4:30 PM. So we’ll need to figure out how to navigate around since we do not have a car. The Uber driver said the traffic in Panama is horrible. So we’re going to find out tomorrow.
More to come….here are a few plane pictures:
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