Listen: there is no quick answer to the question of why we live in Panama.
I always get that question, though: “why?”
I always answer the same way: “cheap pineapple.”
Truthfully, this all started about six years ago. That was when my wife and I decided to take a trip to Spain. The trip was to celebrate our wedding. We had been married 5 years that that point.
We decided that Spain was our destination because we had talked about moving there. This was after our attempt to move to Hawaii had fallen apart in 2006. Spain was very tempting because the climate was great, and property was cheap. Taige had been there before, but I had not. Taige had been to Panama before, and I had not. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I am unable to accept good things as they are, so I sabotaged our easy trip before we bought the tickets. My thought went something like this:
We are going to Spain. For the sake of keeping things spicy, I will create a tournament bracket to decide our destination. This will give me the illusion of chaos in an otherwise chaos-free world, because our destination is predetermined.
Garrett Hammerel, 2016
This quickly clashed with my desire to hold myself accountable to every agreement I ever make (except the one where I promised my wife before I married her that I would give her leg rubs anytime they ached). Let me explain: I created a randomly seeded tournament bracket that we populated with any country we had ever had any interest in, or had been told was cool. We would decide the winner by debate, and eventually unanimous agreement. To keep it fun, though, we decided to allow our friends decide the winners for the first round only. They all knew that we wanted to go to Spain, so it would easily pass the first round, and we would bring it home after that.
Here’s the crux of our story, though: our friends have their own brains, and I committed to accept their decisions no matter what. So, after Joshua D told us one afternoon that Spain was not our destination, we were devastated. We truly had no idea where we would be buying plane tickets to after that day. All-in-all, the bracket took us a few weeks to complete. Spoiler alert, here’s how it ended:
Please keep in mind that at this point, we knew damn near nothing about the world. Our tournament bracket was a crash course in geography for us. We didn’t know what continent most of these destinations occupied when we added them to our list. Why would we need to? We knew where Spain was.
There’s this phenomena in travel that have discovered. It involves people wanting to travel to countries that are typically inhabited by people who look like them. I think it’s a bit of mild racism, but I honestly understand where it comes from. Travel, at first, is very scary. It’s one thing to go to a place where the food and traditions are different. It’s another task entirely to dive into different languages, alphabets, climates, religions, and so on. I mean, how do you know where the bathroom is when the letters look like spaghetti thrown at a wall? Not to mention looking like a tourist… I can pass as a local in Europe as long as I keep my mouth shut, but I look like Shaq compared to a bunch of southeast Asians.
Well, that was us in 2015. We had no interest in going to places outside of Europe’s greatest hits. Fate had different ideas for us, and it changed our lives forever.
Thailand was incredible. I always say that life at home was in sepia, while Bangkok was vibrant Technicolor. We felt like we were in new bodies with new eyes. New ears, new noses. Life was alive. We were actively living, not passively existing. It was stronger than any drug I have ever taken, and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since.
I brought a GoPro with me on that trip. I didn’t end up filming anything, because there was no way to give our trip the respect it deserved through film. How do you explain a color? Similarly, how do you film the smells, tastes, and energy of a place like Thailand? It is an impossible task. Conversely, I have since been to Spain, and I filmed the whole thing. That trip was in 2018. I edited the film in 2021, after I promised my wife that I would in 2020. This was an agreement to allow me to buy a Dodge Viper. One day I hope to hold myself as accountable to agreements made with my wife as I do to agreements made with my friends.
I should make a bet with a friend that I will start doing what I tell my wife I will, then it will surely happen.
I also fart a lot. And I don’t have any money, and I am ugly.
My poor wife.
the eventually home 