Many of our friends, when told we are considering Panama as a retirement location, asked “Why Panama?” Good question. We first became aware of Panama as a retirement location almost by accident. When we first began talking about retirement, like many people, we started looking at articles and blogs about possible retirement locations should we decide to be adventurous. We had known a few people who moved to Costa Rica for a while and seemed to love it. However. we kept running across things about Panama and were intrigued. The interesting thing is that Mike was born in Panama. HIs father was stationed in the Canal Zone in the late 1950s. and he and his older sister were both born at Gorgas Hospital. Though he had not been back since they left when he was a baby, the Panama attraction was strong for both of us.
Being a few years his senior, I began thinking about retirement a bit more seriously than he did back in 2017-18. I began avidly exploring information and was ready to take a visit, but he wasn’t quite there yet. Understandable. However, within a few years his mind set had caught up with me, so we began exploring our options. We are both big researchers and set about garnering as much info as we could get our hands on. We joined several Panamanian Facebook groups, scheduled a relocation tour, renewed our passports, and got more and more excited.
There are a number of ways to go about visiting Panama with relocation in mind, and we did a ton of online research about what our best options were. We were well aware that we could probably explore much of Panama on our own without booking any kind of tour, but with both of us still working we decided that a Panama Relocation Tour was a good fit for us. It would allow us to see much of Panama without having the hassles of finding lodging, planning meals, deciding which locations were best, and all the other logistics of spending a week or two in a foreign country, not to mention the valuable information we could get by being a part of a tour. It turned out to be a great decision for us.
Since, we received our passports surprisingly quickly, we ended up making a quick exploratory trip prior to our tour. This is how that conversation went:
Mike – “Hey we got our passports in just 4 weeks! When is your Spring Break?”
Me – “Second week of March, why?”
Mike – “Want to go to Panama?”
So, we ended up not going second week of March, because flights were outrageous (almost twice what our already booked flights were in June), so we went for a long weekend the second week of April instead. We left on Thursday late afternoon and returned on Monday. We spent our three days in Panama City, one of those a day trip to Taboga Island, and fell in love. We of course did all of the tourist things (canal, Ancon Hill, Amador Causeway, Antigua Viejo, Casco Viejo, Cinta Costera, and our day trip to Taboga Island). The best thing is that we became familiar with much of the city, airport, and transportation options. It certainly relieved any anxiety we might have had going into our tour. In planning our tour, we had decided to extend our stay for another five days to see parts of Panama that were not on our tour. It was a great decision. Read my Panama Relocation Tour Post to learn more about our tour.