It took us several days to accomplish the clearance and check-in requirements without an agent. Thanks our friend John from S/Y Wicked who rented a car, and was helpful in driving us to Colon to the bank to pay for the Canal transit, we got all done quite faster than we had thought it would take! John and his wife Michelle are awesome!! They've been living on their catamaran and their four kids, dog and kitties for 14/15 years now , traveling and living life from their boat!( Same John and Michelle from Cartagena btw) Thanks to them, we also had a chance to food provision and get inexpensive diesel. The most fun part we got to do was...go exploring again!! We love road trips! We went to see the Panama Canal Locks!
Awesomeness! How fun was that! Soon, we'd be going through right there too!
And we got to see a bit of Panama City and it's country.
Much of the US military's buildings , they left about 20+years ago, are in ruins and overgrown now...
They must have been beautiful in their prime.
Saw the dam that controls one the rivers which flows into Gatun Lake. Pretty cool.
The Rio Chagres in the background.
As our friends from S/Y Wicked moved on to other destinations, we explored the area while waiting on our transit date on our Gem.
The Rio Chagres was to be explored!
We thought we'd spend a couple nights there, but we ended up loving it enough to stay 8!
More on that, in our next post 👍🏻