Waiting for the Tsunami

When we were at the beach hanging round the pool, Yella talked to a little neighborhood girl who said, "at 2, my mommy is taking us to David so we don't get hurt by the tsunami."

Tsunami? What tsunami?

This was last Saturday. We did have some information about the earth quake in Japan but give me a break, we were at the beach! We were not up on all the latest stuff.

Into the condo we go, turn on the TV to CNN and, God forbid, Fox (the only major network that we got at the beach), and we start watching the news.

Yep, they were forecasting a tsunami for Panama starting at 5 PM in the west at our beach and 7 pm in Panama City.

We watched the news for a couple of hours. Every indication was that we would get hit with about a 3 foot wave, enough to raise havoc with our beach.

We discussed it at length, thinking that the wave simply couldn't be very big here. We were all the way across the Pacific from Japan and the point of land between Costa Rica and Panama which juts40 miles out into the Pacific should shield us from the wave.

Round and round we go...should we leave...should we stay.

The news said that people in low areas should evacuate. Someone said, "is the beach a low area or what?" Duh!!!

At 5 minutes before the wave was to hit, we scurried out to our car and drove inland, returning in 20 minutes.

No wave. We were right.

But should we really have been debating whether to risk it? When it was so easy to get in the car and drive a few miles inland.

Such is human nature.

I'm glad we finally took some precautions. After all, by the time we actually saw the tsunami wave, it would have been too late to do anything about it...except kiss your ass goodbye.