Preparations for Ocean Crossing to French Polynesia

Spent the week in Panama doing our appointments with the French Embassy for our long stay visas for French Polynesia, then provisioning!! Wow, provisioning! I think I've spent about $3,500 thus far. Mega Depot (7 fully loaded shopping carts and $2,500 of the food) delivers to the stairs, then we take it down the stairs, load a dinghy and bring it to the boat, bring it up the stairs, then sort, organize, clean, then stowe everything. Everything else must be taken back by taxi and dragged from the parking lot to the stairs. I tried once to bring the groceries down the rocks only to take off a chunk of my pinky toe. No easy way to do this. All of the food must be prepared for long term storage in a humid, wet, and tropical environment. The flour is very questionable here, so I bake it before allowing it onboard to erradicate it of moths, weevils, etc. Everything must be in vacuum pack bags or ziplocks or plastic containers. I now have 10 piles for each of 10 months laying out in the bedrooms currently not occupied. Now I need to update my spreadsheet of what I have, what I need, then find the bilge space for it all. Met another boat today that just came from there and indicated that everything is VERY expensive there if you can find it. Many islands have limited options. "Bring everything and then some" was their advice. Should be interesting to see how this goes. So there's my week in review!! Today came to Taboga island to continue to get the food organized and stowed before packing more on. Here we are away from the city, have more options at beaches, clean water for swimming, more protections from waves (created by boats passing who are going to the canal) and nicer atmostphere. In the meanwhile, Courage laid our new living room flooring which looks GREAT!