Benassini-Lyons Travels

 Southwest US road trip time.  We had a few easy days with Grandma and Grandpa Lyons (swimming, basketball, line dancing class, good food, easy living) including having the kids make a simple scale model of what would happen during the total eclipse [sun = 1 meter in diameter newspaper circle, earth = 2 cm newspaper circle, moon ~½ cm circle. Moon will cover sun at +100 meters away; very cool scale model to think about how amazing the eclipse is, that everything lines up] and then we headed out to Texas. Alex and Luke making their one-meter-diameter Sun for the (low tech, but super informative) scale-eclipse model. We stopped at Guadalupe Peak National Park (using the amazing, 4th-grade-free-pass-to-all-National Parks Pass, thanks NPS!), which we learned is the tallest point in Texas. Alex excited about his NPS 4th grade pass! Luke separately adding his excitement to the mix!  We spent our first night in Texas in a small place called Pecos  (named after fictional f...

After a fairly steamy two weeks in Colombia, we were ready to continue on to the jungles and cities in Panama. We flew from Cartagena into the “second” Panama City  airport and picked up an Uber minivan to take us about 90 minutes outside the City, to the Gambia rainforest reserve.  Our very safe driver pointed out Panama City sights (canal, bridge, museum, old town) along the way out of the city.  After receiving a lovely souvenir and business card from our Uber driver (totally worked, we called her for another ride!), we checked into our fancy hotel! We had two sweet hotel rooms along the mighty Chagres River.  The hotel offered free ‘night safaris’ so we checked in, ate some dinner, and jumped into the open air truck with two other people.  We saw sloths, an eagle, and a submerged caiman.  Not bad!  We took advantage of the large and strange hotel grounds (including the tennis-court ruins, ghostly old-American-dredging company housing, and forlorn p...