Uh-Oh. Power Outage?

9:45 PM
Bocas Del Toro, Panama
Hotel Angela
We heard the rain pouring down from outside of our room, but as we have no outside windows, we didn’t know how hard it was raining. So I thought I would go out to the back of Hotel Angela to check it out. (By the way, if you didn’t read my other post talking about Hotel Angela, the back of the hotel is a dock on water so clear you can see the starfish at the bottom of the water, which is10-15 feet below you.) Carrie was with me.
We couldn’t even go out on to the back dock of the hotel, for fear that we might be battered into oblivion by the force of the rain. I have only ever seen rain like that one other time – in China during a monsoon… literally anything that’s in the rain is blowing sideways – people, trees, cars, boats, small family pets, etc.
We’re here in the off season, so tonight (Wednesday night) we’re the only guests here at Hotel Angela.
I noticed that water was streaming through a window left open by someone on the second floor in the stairwell (the hotel is just 2 stories).. I thought maybe no one else would go up there to close it, so I went up to close the window (call it my good deed for the day).
No sooner had I gotten the window closed than everything went completely black.
Power outage…

I knew we’d need our headlamps for La Tortuga Feliz.
What I didn’t know was that we’d need them here at Hotel Angela or at Bocas Del Toro.
But I’m writing this post by the light of my headlamp and on the battery of my computer.
Carrie was at the bottom of the stairs, so I called down to her and fumbled my way back down the stairs, meeting her at the bottom of the steps.
We walked back to our room while a couple members of the hotel staff rushed by, using their cell phones as flashlights, doing whatever they needed to do to deal with the power outage.
We got back to our room to discover that our room still had light!
Not from overhead or bedside lighting however.
Our lighting was being provided by our laptops.
I wouldn’t have thought that the light of a laptop with long battery life could be part of an emergency preparedness kit.
By the light of our laptops, we located our headlamps and batteries (which we had taken out after leaving La Tortuga Feliz, thinking we wouldn’t need them in the foreseeable future, and in order to conserve the batteries).
We were able to get the batteries back in the headlamps because of our computer light.
Carrie said it best by saying “The Boy Scouts had it right. Always be prepared.”
As I’m writing this, the rain is still pouring down, and of course we don’t know when we’ll get power back.
It’s attempted to kick back on twice… make that three times.
2 seconds the first time, 5 seconds the second time, and about 8 seconds the third time.
It stays on long enough to give you hope, and then goes away again.
But I do hope it will be on again soon, because the electricity powered air conditioner not only served the purpose of cooling the room, but it also provided white noise. Without the AC, we have no outside air in our room, so if we want to breathe, we have to leave the door open to our room. There’s some really icky smell wafting in from somewhere, we have the beeping of a backup power supply coming from somewhere in the hotel, and the voices of a couple of rather loud people are echoing down the hall and directly into our room.
Time to conserve the battery, now at 76%, just in case my hope is misplaced and in case it’s really needed for something more than writing about this funny evening adventure in Panama.
(Turns out, the power outage only lasted only about 40 minutes. If anyone from Bocas Del Toro reads this, I’d like to thank whoever it was from Bocas Del Toro who was out in that driving rain working to restore power. Thanks as well to the Hotel Angela staff who sprung into action once the power was back on and the rain had slowed, in order to prepare the hotel for the next day’s activity.)

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