Elizabeth Ballard, M.S.
My blogs
Blogs I follow
| Gender | Female |
|---|---|
| Introduction | It takes a decent dose of crazy to pack up two suitcases each & move your life to another country. With kids. Or in our case, one kid. In the winter of 2008, with our youngest son only mid-way through the 3rd grade, we moved to a rural town in the Panama Highlands. Boquete is a farming town, peppered with fancy, newer, expat homes & gated communities. But a farming town nonetheless. No movie theater. No skate park. Nothing went as planned. Our Florida home didn't sell; our savings crashed along with the market. So, we sold the Panama dream home & traded down for a dump. Or what I used to call "our Panama Crack House." Well, we fixed that up, but there you go. It didn't sell. So for 3-1/2 years... we owned & operated a restaurant: Big Daddy's Grill, Boquete! All this we did while navigating the personal & ongoing hell of how to continue our son's education. At times it feels like Old Testament living: Snakes at the table; wipe-out floods; tree-felling winds; earthquakes; and mudslides. So we lived in our Not dream house, worked harder than we ever imagined, and the adventure continues... |