Goodbye to the Girls!

Today officially marked the end of a great time with the ladies, which also means it’s time to get back to cranking out miles southward. We dropped Shelly off at the airport first thing in the morning and then headed through San Jose and climbed upwards over the pass south, spending a couple of hours up in the rainforest. We covered a lot of ground today, driving through mountains, expansive pineapple plantations, and eventually followed Rio Superior for a while, a river that compares to the Colorado in size. As usual, the Panamanian border took a solid couple of hours, as we waited for people to type, mess with paper jams and broken computers, etc. Border crossings have been the most frustrating part of this trip, and unfortunately just aren’t avoidable. A process that should take no more than 5-10 minutes takes hours because of each country’s desire to look official and have all kinds of stamps, but then they couple it with absurdly inefficient processes, organization, and manpower. The closest description I can come up with is standing at the post office on the day that packages need to ship in time for x-mas, and there is only one person at the desk, their computer doesn’t work, they’re deaf and you’re trying to explain that you need to ship five different packages to different locations with hand signs…