A day after my return from Grand Cayman I was back at DTW, headed to Panama. While spending Valentines day traveling was a downer, I did learn two new things about Panama.
1. They have a new burger place where they put Velveeta cheese inside the beef. Best idea since I was at McMenamin's (Portland, OR), where they put tater tots inside the burger. Don't even try to steal my cheese tater tot burger idea, I got there first.
2. Balboa is more then a beer in Panama - he was an actual guy. Everything in Panama is named Balboa (streets, banks, stores). I assumed they were all named after Balboa Beer, but actually this conquistador guy came first.
Since I'm too lazy to read up, I just asked around about this guy during my trip. This is what I've been able to piece together:
Balboa has some tax problems. To solve his problems, he does the first international dine-'n-dash and skips the country on a ship, hidden in a wood barrel. At some point, the people on the ship must have found him. Instead of throwing him overboard, he somehow convinces them to him run with this Panama idea. I'm not sure what their "Plan A" idea was, but it must have pretty weak because they opted to let the guy hiding in the wine barrel run the settlement.
So apparently Panama thing is somehow a success. No canal yet. But anyway, Balboa starts running his mouth. Not sure how gossip works back then, but somehow the King finds out. So then the King, or maybe one of his boys, goes to Panama and cuts off Balboa's head! Then the King tells everyone they need to move to present day Panama City. The citizens were like "Yeah cool, we're good with that. We were listening to this guy we found in a wood barrel, but you cut his head off. So we'll go with your idea now."
And that is how Panama was invented.
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