After having the auction, moving and quitting our jobs we thought we’d splurge and go on our first 2 week long vacation to an all inclusive, somewhere hot. We got a great deal for the Royal Decameron resort in Panama for the middle of January and boy was it hot. It had to be close to 40 C every day....Perfect!
Overall, it was a pretty decent place.....we had no complaints but if you go to trip advisor, there are a lot picky people in the world who really need to learn to relax when they’re on vacation. The only problem we had with it was that it was just too big. Made it difficult to get to know other guests but lots of walking and stairs to wear off the food and booze was a good thing.
The one thing that was really different about this place from any other we’ve been to was the life guards:
# 1 - there were a lot of them, about 20. The beach front at the resort was huge and there was a guard about every 500 ft and at least one at each of the 7 (or 8?) pools.
# 2 - they were in incredible shape! How do I know this? Every morning I’d get up early (while Dave slept) to get our shady spot for the day. Yes, I’m one of “those people” but I just woke up before 6:00 am, I didn’t set an alarm honest!. But I didn’t just drop my towels and go back to the room...no, I watched the life guards go thru their boot camp style workout from 6-8:30 am every morning (You missed some really nice scenery Carol-Ann!). I have another picture of them in our album just for you ladies but it doesn’t do them justice. I should have gotten closer...RATZ! And by the way, I didn’t just watch, I actually did work out most mornings too, I ran on the beach for about 20-30 minutes...sometimes I was even “lucky” enough to follow the life guards for a while when they ran. Good incentive!
Life guard workouts
Anyways, they were definitely fit so it made you feel pretty safe going in the water, if there was trouble, they were there fast. The other odd thing about Panama and it might have just been the time of year but there were a number of people that got stung by sting rays (at least that’s what all the talk said it was). I saw one guy right after he got “attacked”. His toe was bleeding and he was in agony. About 4 life guards were all attending to him and he ended up being taken off the beach via golf cart, he couldn’t walk. We saw a few other guests in wheel chairs with their feet bandaged up. It made going in the ocean a bit nerve racking but we still went in, we didn’t go all that way to swim in a pool.
Two weeks of vegging on the beaching and playing volleyball was perfect. We didn’t end up doing any trips off of the resort but had we been there for longer, I think we would have ventured off and done some site seeing. Oh well, we’ll save that for when we’re down there on our road trip.