May 28, 2005 - Los Angeles, California

Square 15

Coming to Los Angeles has been like diving deep, deep into my past. I'm dividing my time between sleeping on the couch at the apartment where I lived and worked seven years ago and at the friend's house where I staid each time I got ready to move to another place. I've been going through boxes that were stored for me a year and a half ago and weeding out the luggage I can no longer allow myself to carry. I phoned an old friend for the first time in years, a programmer who used to work with us, about working on a web project for a friend's non-profit organization. Then I went back even further in time, helping an interior designer with her concept boards and assisting her in managing her jobs. Which is what I briefly did for a large design firm when I first moved to this city in 1997. But the strangest blast from the past is something I pulled out of storage and started using again for the first time in fifteen years. I'm walking around wearing a jeans jacket to which I applied a bunch of patchwork when I was about fifteen years old. Fifteen!!!!! That feels like it was ages ago. It's like I went back to look at the beginnings of my adult life from a whole new perspective. Back to square fifteen...

posted by Mahi at 2:28 PM 1 comments
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May 16, 2005 - Panama City, Panama

East Coast / West Coast

I've only been here a very short time, but I feel like it´s been months - I've been traversing this land at dizzying speeds. After a good night of bad weather and a couple of days calm sailing, we arrived in Portobello at nightfall the day before yesterday. (Portobello is a beautiful small town on the Caribbean side of the country, a very important place during Spanish colonial times but quite sleepy these days) We were picked up by the owner of the boat yesterday, and --in about an hour and a half driving time-- brought here to Panama City, which is on the Pacific coast. Today we were taken back to Colon (east coast, as I know it) to finish up our check-in process, as yesterday was a Sunday and apparently nobody gets let into the country on Sundays. We spent some time in the duty free zone, which is a huge guarded wholesale shopping neighborhood open to those with a foreign passport, and then took a long bus ride back to Panama. The city, that is. On the Pacific. Technically, that´s in the south of the country, but I've always thought of it as the west coast. So we´ve been riding from north to south (or east to west) and back on a daily basis. But break out the atlas for a minute: if you look carefully, you´ll notice the trip along the Panama canal from Colon to Panama City actually runs slightly eastward from the Caribbean Sea entrance to the other entrance on the Pacific Ocean... Try wrapping your brain around that one!!!

posted by Mahi at 8:45 PM 1 comments
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May 10, 2005 - Isla de Providencia, Colombia

Almost there...

After a five day sail from Isla Mujeres, we´re a two day sail away from Portobello, Panama. We stopped here to fix the roller furler that decided to move six feet to the right of where it´s supposed to be (which is at the tip of the bow, because it has a headsail attached to it) in the middle of the first night´s sail. Thankfully, we were able to keep things under control. Jim did a great job of quickly securing the furler so we could pull the sail down and attach a halyard to the bow to keep from losing the mast. We made it here safely and are enjoying the beauty and friendly atmosphere on this very Caribbean island. Temporarily, that is. We´ll be leaving for Panama within the next couple of days.

posted by Mahi at 4:19 PM 0 comments
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May 4, 2005 - Isla Mujeres, Mexico

And the winner is...

Panama. But no motorcycle - it doesn't fit on deck. We're leaving today!

posted by Mahi at 10:46 AM 0 comments
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