All roads lead through Paris, and in this case through Panama City. We made it through with nary a misstep and found ourselves on the Autopiste heading west. I don't think I have mentioned yet that we have no electronics with us, and I left my compass in my car at home. We have a 2001 Lonely Planet guidebook to Panama which I was planning to read on the plane from Denver to Tocumen before we were seated next to the best looking woman in the waiting area, a Colombian dentist living in Colorado, on her way to Colombia, who happened to be an exchange student to Waverly, Iowa. We also have a tour brochure from the airport.

But no worries, Mimi is getting better as a navigator and we have two pages of instructions on how to find Maria Gonzalez in Pocri, which Frank wrote out for us. Mimi does get car sick from time to time, but she always pukes outside of the car, although she did do it once right in front of a bus stop!

We roll into Pocri, bear to the left at the police station, pass the church, pass the cantina, then a door to door search for Maria Gonzalez takes us to the house with the camion parked in front. That house was empty, but Maria was just next door, exactly across from the cantina. Her husband admitted that he was who he was, and he also admitted that there was a Maria Gonzalez there as well, but he didn't know why we were there until I showed him Frank's handwritten instructions, then he exclaimed, "Francisco!" We left Mimi there with Maria and he took me to the house and we opened it up and turned on the water.

I gave them $40 and indicated 2 nights, and they gave me Mimi back. There was a toilet and shower downstairs, and the upstairs had a sink, several beds with mosquito netting, lots of windows with shutters, and a deck in front. I gave Mimi a choice of where to set up the tent, and she chose on the deck, which was a good choice. We set up our laundry line in the upstairs and I had my kitchen there as well.

We had a huge lunch in a point at the food type restaurant on the way there, right beside the Pan-American highway, which included a large piece of thin beef steak, some salad and yams, and the usual heap of rice.

Next day we headed to Pedasi, which seems to be a bit of a regional center. Lots of vacation home type subdivisions and retirees. Town itself about 4 blocks long. Nice beach and views there, but then we head back to Pocri and Mimi takes me on the shell-collecting odyssey. We see a bunch of shark heads which the fishermen have thrown out, then Mimi starts picking up shells as we head down the beach and the tide continues to retreat. She fills up containers and we leave them behind and find new ones to fill up and continue. There is a set of horse tracks, but we see no one the whole way. I wanted to get to a point and look around the point, I tell her, and we get there after walking 6 miles on a beach about 150 yards deep and look around and there is just endless beach as far as we could see, maybe 20 miles ahead of us. We found 25 sand dollars and hauled our treasure back to the house.

Pocri is a small fishing village, at least we were down right on the water. There was about a 30' high berm right behind our house, then the rest of the village, but I think that the area up above was considered Pocri as well. We leave the key at Maria's house as we depart the next morning to head towards David, then Boquete.