It seems the first question I’m asked when meeting a new person in Boquete is “Why did you move to Boquete?”, not “When did you move to Boquete?’, but WHY? Each time I’m asked that question, I answer it in a different way. Just today I replied to a wide-eyed visitor that “I love the air!”. The air is amazingly clear, clean and cool, I noticed it the first day I arrived in Boquete 7 years ago. I almost laughed at my response, but that’s the way I am, I speak what I feel, even if it sounds silly.
This afternoon, I began really thinking about why I came to Boquete and why my husband and I decided to stay. My story isn’t the usual one about people who decide to “retire in Panama”, oh no! I had no idea of retiring, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was still young, I had a flourishing private law practice and I spent much of my time traveling the world, which has been a lifetime goal of mine. I certainly wasn’t old enough to retire anyway – or was I??
As David and I drove into the town of Boquete, it was dark on a Friday night and there were very few lights to help us find our little B&B just around the corner from the main street in the center of town. I’ll tell you more about the 3-room B&B another time, it was most charming and it’s still here. Before dark the next morning, we donned our backpacks and headed to the trailhead of Volcan Baru, a couple miles up above the town. The park attendant awoke at the sounds of our voices and collected the $1 from each of us, I don’t think anyone gets past him without paying, no matter how early or late you make the trip.
A couple hours into the climb, the light began to show the most lovely little valley town I have ever seen. It reminded me of those charming Swiss villages high in the Alps we see pictured on calendars, only this town was sparkling in the bright sunshine, surrounded by lush green jungles and capped with rich, deep-blue sky. And the air – - it was so clear, clean and cool, sound familiar? The birds were up and talking to me, the flowers were opening everywhere, butterflies were sipping their nectar, the views were huge in every direction, and I was in paradise.
After a short discussion of how we felt just being there, we skipped back into town, looked for a real estate office and saw a “cheap vacation home”, our very own “home-away-from-home”. To our surprise, we decided to buy the second house we looked at, wrote a deposit check that afternoon and headed back to Florida the next morning. We bought a piece of paradise! Would we ever want to move to the mountains from Florida, why not?
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