canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
canyonwalker ([personal profile] canyonwalker) wrote2025-01-06 04:26 pm

Pissed Off in Panama. Time's Finite.

Panama Travelog #Whatever
Everywhere we went - The whole damn week.

Our trip to Panama in late December, which we returned from a week ago, was an exercise in joy and frustration. Exercise is an unfortunately apropos term as it often took effort to find the joy and hold onto any sense of it amidst all the setbacks.

What went wrong? Lots of things big and small. I'll group it into categories as Five Things:


Okay, so that's six things when I promised 5. Even when I group the problems by category there are still too many.

"Okay, so it wasn't perfect," you might respond. "Whenever is a trip perfect?" And haven't I congratulated myself before on planning flexibly so I can call an audible when plans need to change?

Sure, I know things don't go perfectly. That's what I plan to be ready to call an audible when necessary. But understand that calling an audible means crossing things off the list and skipping them. It's fine to do that a small number of times. After a certain number of times it's just frustrating.

What's the frustration, BTW? Aren't there other things I can do? The frustration is about money and opportunity.

Money: We spent several thousand dollars on this trip. It's a real pisser when things we aim to do are suddenly not available. Sure, there are other things to do, but when I get down to having to choose between fourth and fifth choice, is it still worth the thousands of dollars to be here? If I'd known in advance I may have chosen not to go there. ...And gone elsewhere instead. Which leads to the second issue....

Opportunity: Possibly more so than wasting money it's wasted time. I have finite opportunities for international trips like this. Recently it's been 1-2 a year. I do not have an infinite number of years of life. Fewer, even, of active, globe-trotting, get-outdoors-and-do-stuff life. This trip means using up a ticket from a very limited number of tickets in my proverbial ticket book. It infuriates me to see that I've burned one of those tickets on a trip that hits failures left, right, and center.


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