Wednesday Happenings

From Mark Overholt ‘09…

Wednesday morning we had another amazing breakfast with Ivan at the bed and breakfast. We were picked up at about 8:15 and went to the STRI headquarters in Panama City. We worked all morning on the data entry scripts for the project. We encountered quite a few problems with many parts of the code that confused everyone at the meeting.

We took a break for lunch around noon and ate with the head of the CTFS group, Stewart. He was a great guy, and we talked about the future of the project a little bit. After lunch we got right back to work on the code that we were having problems with. Not to bore you with all of the details, but suffice it to say, some things would work in Internet Explorer and not in Firefox, and other things would work in Firefox and not IE. It completely confused all of us.

But by about 3 p.m., we finally figured it out, and after that, it made the rest of the day much better with that weight lifted off our shoulders. We then made a plan for the future of the project. We figured out what needed to be done, and we decided what we would finish this semester back in Peoria, and what future groups’ tasks would be.

After working, we went to the top of the STRI complex and took in an amazing view of Panama City. Afterwards we went out to the Causeway, which is a man-made island just off the coast. We walked around the forest a bit and saw a two-toed sloth, eating mangos in a tree. We also ate dinner there at an amazing seafood resturaunt. After dinner we started to drive home and stopped at a grocery store to buy some food for our trip to the beach on Thursday. When we arrived in Gamboa, we enjoyed the rest of the evening, talking with Ivan before going to bed. Tomorrow we are taking a two-hour trip to Portobela beach,  a nice beach on the Caribbean side of Panama.

The Beach Beckons on Thursday

Today was our off day from project-related activities. We woke up and ate some breakfast with Ivan again this morning. Rick came to pick us up about 10 a.m., and we began our two-hour drive to Portobela beach. The drive was fairly uneventful other than some nasty potholes in some of the roads. We arrived in Portobela and met with our boat driver. He took us to the small beach where we would enjoy our day.

But we couldn’t leave until we picked up one more passenger! Right before leaving, we were handed a small turtle to take with us. Apparently, he had managed to swim to shore, and we were going to put him back in the water farther from the shoreline on our way out. After about 15 minutes on the boat, we reached the spot where we let the turtle go.

Then we were off to the beach. We were the only people on this beach; it was wonderful. We ate some of the sandwiches we brought with us, and then donned our snorkels and masks and headed out into the water. We spent a majority of the time snorkeling around the area of the beach. Many spectacular fish and coral made the experience a memorable one. Ed also says he saw a seahorse, but no one else saw it, so we are having to take him at his word on that one.

We left the beach around 3:45 and made our way back to the mainland. We cleaned up and then headed to a resturaunt on the coastline. It was quite spectacular. We ate a somewhat early dinner because we had a two-hour drive back to Gamboa ahead of us. Despite some heavy traffic on the way back, we made it in one piece. Now we are all cleaning up, heading to bed, and getting ready for the trip to BCI tomorrow. The boat for BCI leaves at 7:15 a.m., so it will be an early start.