Return to XS Memories in Santa Clara

Having completed our business in Panama City and with now about 3 weeks to wait for the Galaxy Leader to take the RV, we have decided to go back to one of our favourite places - Santa Catalina and settle there for a couple of weeks. As we don't really like to drive too far each day, we will take a break in Santa Clara at XS Memories. This is an RV park complete with sewer (so we can clean our tanks) and internet. The restaurant is pretty decent also, although we tend to cook most of our meals ourselves. We will take the opportunity to skpye Tom's mom and sister, the kids and those friends whose skype addresses we have. If you would like to add our skype to yours, the address is Tom.Angela.Conry. The only drawback to the park is that we have to keep Winston tethered because of the 2 large Dobermans that are onsite. In addition to the dogs, the owners have a few cats and quite a menagerie of birds - 3 green and yellow parrots, an african grey, a scarlet macaw, a pair of military/blue & gold mixed macaws and 3 toucans, 2 are the regular type that you see in lots of pictures and the other is much smaller, oh and let's not forget their monkey that swings in the trees. The birds make quite a ruckus in the morning but the 3 parrots talk all day. One knows the ring of a cell phone so it will "ring" 4 - 5 times and then answer in a sweet old lady voice, incredible English "Hello" pause "How are you doing?". At this point the other 2 pipe up and one says "Hi" in a young, almost childlike voice and the other a loud "Hola" in a gruffer male voice. Then all birds go quiet, only to start the whole exercise over again, every 3 minutes or so. This is intersperced with other questions from them "How are you?" "What are you doing?" and "I'm fine" amongst others. It is all very amusing if a little repetitive. Winston was very enamored with them at first but now when they start up he just sighs and tries to go back to sleep. The best part of the park though, in my opinion is the swimming pool. It is really quite a treat to have access to a pool and on the hot, humid days there really is nothing better than to slip into the cool water. But, we will only be here one night before going to the beach at Santa Catalina. I will make use of that pool a couple of times. We will return here from the playa before we leave Panama as it is a great place to regroup and get the RV ready for shipment. Tom is hoping there are some good waves for boogie boarding and we have a few books that we have downloaded from the library onto our Sony ereader. For anyone interested in getting into the electronic books, Tom & I love ours. They have proven invaluable as we both like to read and because of space the only books we are travelling with is a few guide books. We can download books from our library in San Jose so we don't have to purchase books at all and we have plenty of reading material. Well, it is time to prepare the RV for moving and get on the road as we have a rather long drive today to get to Santa Catalina. Have fun.