Life is Good...hopefully

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what procrastination looks like.  I have so many things to do my to do list is actually laughing at me - no really, if it had a voice it would be laughing at me.  And yet while Brittany, Jen and I were putting together our tables for a poster presentation next week we started talking about Panama and made Jen and I think of Mr. Life is Good Nalgene...which is a pretty awesome story that we feel as though all the loyal blog readers should hear.

So this...is me and Mr. Life is Good Nalgene...

You may be able to see the little Life is Good man looking happy about life, much as I am looking happy about life last year in Panama.  Yes, I said last year.  That was 2010 (in case you were wondering at this moment there are sharp shooters behind us laying on the beach to ensure the rebels didn't just set up a distraction boat that the majority of our soldiers just went off to take care of...just saying, you don't forget where you are sometimes...perhaps this explains my face a little bit more).

But back to the Nalgene.  So, as you can imagine, hydration is rather important on the islands.  And as you can also imagine, drinking the water there is not an option.  So we get big bottles of water and take water bottles to fill up and drink throughout the day.  Drinking water is not a joke when you are sweating every moment of the day and night.  Under the tarp on this truck is 350...yes 350 gallons of water that we took with us this year.

In 2010 I took Mr. Life is Good Nalgene.  It just so happens that he is a rather well travelled Nalgene bottle.  My dad got him for me for our second trip to Mt. Rainier, so he happens to be traveling in my backpack in this picture.  Yes, that is me, and yes, it's that steep.  

But I digress.  In 2011 I decided to switch it up and chose to take my red no BPA Nalgene who has kinda missed all the action because he is pretty new.  Jen didn't have a Nalgene and asked to borrow one, so I gave her the veteran Mr. Life is Good.  As you can see he was very excited, helping with medicine...

...checking out the best Kuna shower ever (I'm not joking people it was spectacular, those faces don't lie!)...

...at meals, at prayer, at service, at clinic, in the rooms, in the silah hut...if Jen was there, Mr. Life is Good Nalgene was with her.  You actually feel like you are missing something once you get back to civilization and don't have a water bottle attached to you at all times.

Enter the ride from hell.  I am not kidding you, it is difficult to explain how bad it was to people that were not there to experience the horror.  The short version is that it involved a driver that didn't know how to drive a 4 wheel drive car and yet had been hired to do just that, attempting to get us up a mountain and instead us drifting back down the steep, winding mountain road into oncoming traffic coming up the steep winding mountain road, our translator screaming to him what gear to get into, him nearly running us off the edge of the cliff before coming to a stop, someone THANKFULLY taking over and getting us up the mountain, and then said horrible driver deciding it was appropriate to go down the mountain at about 80 miles an hour in a crazy rain storm that didn't stop until we got to our hotel 3 and a half hours later.  Tragic is an understatement.  At one point I actually prayed 'God, if I am supposed to die on this mountain, I'm ok with it, just please don't make it hurt.'  Like I said, tragic.

All of that to say, we obviously had our water bottles with us, and our water bottles obviously were the least of our concerns when we were trying to escape the car ride from hades thanking God we had been spared.  And so...about 2 hours later Jen realized much to our sadness that Mr. Life is Good Nalgene was inadvertently left in the back of the car.  We can see him rolling back and forth in the back of the truck, with horrible driver man oblivious to the whole thing.  In that case life is NOT good for Mr. Life is Good Nalgene.

We can also see him making some Kuna person very happy when they find him and perhaps he is living on an island somewhere in the Kuna Islands.

Or perhaps he has been picked up and lives in some unknown place in the world.  Oh Mr. Life is Good man...thank you for your many days of hydration service...may you find many more.