CROSSING THE FINISH LINE

November 14th  froms Panam City:

Yota crossed over the Panama Canal on the 10th of November.  Independence Day of Panama from Spain. Geogrphically, that marks the end of the trip through Central America.  It was difficult at times, but worth the effort.  I don't think that I'm exactly the same person as the one that crossed the border into Mexico on October 11th. 

For the last few days, I've been trying to make arrangements for what to do with Yota.  I can put her in bonded storage, but it costs about as much as to ship her back to the states. I can sell her, but have to pay an import fee of about $2500. which means I would net maybe $4000.  And I'm not sure of the legality of that. I'd be doing business with a dealer who   says  he would do all the paper work.  But, it could take days to walk that through the beurocracy. 

It took me two days just to figure out the scheme for warehousing.  The first day here, I stood in line all day long just to be told that I was at the wrong agency.  The next day was spent driving around endlessly looking for the National Customs House, the Policia Technical Judicial, and the warehousing people.  I found all of them.  but it's impossible to go anywhere without getting lost. Nothing can be resolved over the phone. I have a good map, but it doesn't help much.  There are hardly ever any street signs and no numbers for induvidual buildings.  I spent 45 minutes looking for a street. Then, it turned out I was on it the whole time

Other than that, theres not much to blog about. I'm having some work done on Yota today. Turns out she wore out her tie-rods banging into pot holes on the way here.

The length of the trip from Merritt Island to the Canal was 7090 miles exactly.  It's 1170 air miles from here to Miami.  It's a small world, but it's folded kind of funny.

That's it from Panama....
Guy