Panama City

busses in central america are really rad. they must get old yellow school busses from the US and then totally pimp them out. the tourists here call them "chicken busses" because you can see people carrying chickens on them. the paint jobs are totally wild. a lot of them have sort of fantasy scenes painted on them like bikini girls hanging out in glaciers with polar bears. some of them have new england farm house scenes painted on them, which in central america must seem equally exotic. this is a photo of one of the chicken busses mud flaps. check out the sweet bikini babes on this bad boy. the driver thought it was so cool that we were taking photos of his bus.
i think we went the wrong way through costa rica and missed a lot of cool stuff because we took the coast instead of the mountain route. the coast was flat, but it seemed like one giant american retirement community with huge gated communities everywhere. we met this german cyclist who said the coast was beautiful, but that there was 40 km of dirt road, but that is was "fine". this was the worst dirt road ever. it was like riding through mud for hours. i think we were only going 3 mph. everything was bouncing around, and a screw snapped in half on peter's rack. my bike got so muddy, that my drive train would just totally freeze up and i couldn't pedal forward. in a couple days erik flies home to vermont, but clyde has recoverd from dengue and flew into panama yesterday, so now we are a group of three again, minus erik plus clyde. hope everyone had a really nice thanksgiving. love,
-jessie