May 23rd, 10:30pm local time
Corredor, Costa Rica
GPS: 

Today marks the first time that we've gone through an entire country in a single day.  We're going to try and shoot for two countries tomorrow, which will put us through Nicaragua and into Honduras for tomorrow night.

Yesterday, we got into Panama too late for us to get our bikes through customs – they apparently close, here, and we had to come back this morning, at 6am.  When they told us six am, they apparently meant 8am.  Then, after many semi-coherent conversations, we found out that we have to get a permit to drive our bikes in Panama City.  Which we'd be leaving in ten minutes.  To get our permits to drive our bikes in Panama City, we have to drive our bikes fifteen minutes away to go stand in line for two hours.  All of us needed to go, we were told.  The airport lady was wrong about that, and Justin and I ended up leaving to go back to the airport and do some maintenance on our bikes.

Once again the equatorial sun kicked our butts, and we came away even more burned than before.  I don't think that I'll peel, but Justin has a nice outline of a muscle shirt on his oh-so-pale skin in a cheerful shade of boiled lobster.

We finally got through customs at about noon, and burned some rubber to get out of there.  We weren't allowed to have any gas in our tanks when we put them on the plane (we weren't actually supposed to have even the batteries hooked up, but they were still working), so we were pretty much bone dry, and pulled over to the first service station to grab some gas.

At the Shell station, we ran into this guy named John – born in Panama, but lived many years growing up in the US.  He told us about these two guys that had set a world record riding JET SKIS from Alaska to Panama, with the intent to ride them through the canal and over to Miami.  Unfortunately, apparently you have to have a real boat pilot to get a watercraft through the canal, and they weren't, so were stuck in Panama.  Anyways, he kept trying to get us to go do some tourist stuff like watch a boat go through the docks in the canal or something, which we would really have liked to do.  But customs took six hours, and ate up every spare hour we had.  Customs is a pain in the butt everywhere we go.

Dad keeps thinking he needs the super expensive gasoline for his bike, and so his single tank of gas + jerry can cost as much as the other three bikes totaled.  I think we offended the gas station guy when we scrutinized the bill so closely.  Ah, well.

We hit our first major rain today about 2pm.  We'd encountered a little bit in Ecuador and Colombia, but this was a full-on rainstorm.  This would have to be the hardest rain i've ever ridden in, and it lasted for hours and hours.  We were all soaked to the bone within minutes.  On the plus side, though, Panama has the fastest roads we've encountered so far short of the area around Santiago in Chile.  Much of it is four-lane divided highway, and what isn't is straight and smooth.  Just watch out for the shoulders – for much of the day, the shoulder was a straight drop two feet down off the road proper.  Yay for good roads – we're becoming quite the connoisseurs of roadways during this trip.

I managed to stay pretty dry during this whole thing – I'd bundled up when we first saw we were going into a rainstorm, in the full rain getup – pants, jacket, boot covers &amp; rain mitts.  I stayed damp and warm the whole time – even my feet, until Justin (who was navigating) stopped the bikes in the middle of a freaking lake at Costa Rica customs, blocking my only way out.  I had no choice but to drop my feet into shin-deep water, and my boots immediately filled up with ice-cold, dirty water.  I was the only one that bundled up in rain gear, and was the only one that still cared about getting their feet wet.  My whining received no sympathy from the boys.

We finally got through Panama about an hour after sunset, and were set to burn into Costa Rica and make some good time 'fore it was time to go to bed.  Unfortunately, the customs agent had a different agenda, and it took us TWO hours to get through customs.  The border had some interesting characters, though – one guy had a job sweeping rainwater.  That's right – he'd wait around until water pooled on this concrete pad, and then he'd spend about ten minutes making sure it was all swept off.  Then he'd set the broom against the wall, and lean back and watch the water collect again.  

There was this crazy guy (i'm assuming homeless, 'cause he was sitting on some dirty cardboard) who kept trying to sell us some polished rocks.  Justin and Sean bought some – apparently they'd been polished by the action of sand and waves, and the beach that did this had been destroyed in a monsoon or something.

Today marks one – if not the first – day in which no bikes were dropped.  That's right, nothing was tipped over, not even once.  

When we were FINALLY through customs, we'd wasted the driving time we'd planned to have, and drove into the first decent-sized town we came to, which happened to be the only decent-sized town for quite some ways.  Every hotel/hostel/hospedaje/hosteria we went to had no room.  Apparently many people had the same idea we did, but got there sooner.

We finally enlisted the help of this unwashed crazy-beard guy and he found us a roach motel buried away on a side street.  It was cheap, and had a gated courtyard we parked our bikes in, and that's about everything nice i can say about it.  I didn't want to use the toilet, and the shower was a horror best left to the imagination.  Instead of using the provided 'blankets', I spread them on the floor so that my bare, wet feet wouldn't have to touch it, and we all dug our sleeping bags out of our luggage and slept in them.  I was upset about that – I'd lost my sleeping bag bag a while ago, and purchased a new one when I was doing shopping for this trip.  I'd overestimated my sleeping-bag-squishing-ability, and now it takes me half an hour to get my sleeping bag stuffed into this tiny little bag i got for it.

I'm exhausted and soaked, and this room is stinky.
Ryan Noble,
Corredor, Costa Rica