And Now We're Birders

The cooler mountains of Boqute, Panama were exactly what we were hoping for. The sun was warm during the day, but nights were cool and you needed a sweatshirt. Oh, and there was an amazing bakery, Sugar & Spice, that had free coffee refills and some of the most amazing muffins I’ve tasted in a long time.

We took full advantage of the weather; ran in the mornings, tried to hike up volcano’s, found hot springs and played scrabble. Yes, Katie beat me, but don’t worry I returned the favor and was undefeated at Yahtzee. 

We met back up with our friends Sardinetaco, who also had a traveling companion, Dean’s cousin Cara. Suddenly there were enough of us for a party!

One afternoon we decided that we’d hike up to a waterfall outside of town and that was when it happened. About half way up the trail Sara stopped and pointed. To all of our amazement there in front of us was one of the most sought after birds in all of the birding world. The Resplendent Quetzal. Not only was there just one female, but five of them. At that moment we were all so excited and decided YES we were all birders! The waterfall became a distant second goal of the hike. Now that we’d seen the females we were all on high alert to scope out one of the males with one of their long blue tails.

We made our way up to the waterfall, which only held us for a while. After all, we were birders now. As we made our way down the trail we were moving a bit slower and still attentive to our surroundings, looking for the male Quetzal.
As the hike was winding to an end, we thought we were lucky to see just the females and that would have to be that. However, Sara, again with her spotting luck, stopped us all on the trail to point out another Quetzal and to our surprise it was the male with the long blue tail that we’d been hoping for. We stood in silence as it sat up there and stared back at us. YES, again we were all really excited about being birders!

After the hike we scoped out a spot to set up camp. After a little debating, the fairgrounds parking lot would be our abode for the night. In the brisk evening we enjoyed a campfire and Katie’s famous curry. At some point we were all discussing our paperwork and shipping the cars, and we all had paperwork out to compare numbers, etc. It was then we made the startling discovery that George’s passport number was wrong on the van importation paperwork… Bummer, this meant that we were headed back to the border the next day to get it corrected. Good thing the roads were in good condition and it would be a relatively easy drive…