The Places Behind Rainbow Season: Boquete, Panama

There are places you visit.

And then there are places that somehow become part of you.

For me, Boquete, Panama, is the latter.

When I traveled there in March 2023, I had no idea I would eventually write a novel set among those mountains. I certainly didn't know that experiences from that trip—the landscape, the adventures, the people I met, and the feeling of being very far from ordinary life—would follow me home and quietly wait until I was ready to turn them into a story.

At the time, I wasn't looking for material for a book.

I was simply trying to figure out what came next.

And maybe that's why Boquete became the perfect setting for Rainbow Season.

Because Paige Martin arrives there asking essentially the same question.

A Place That Feels Like an Exhale

Boquete sits in the highlands of western Panama, surrounded by mountains, coffee farms, waterfalls, and an impossible amount of green.

It's cooler than the tropical Panama people often picture. Mist settles over the mountains. Flowers seem to grow everywhere. Clouds move through the valleys, sometimes obscuring everything before suddenly opening to reveal a view you weren't expecting.

There's something about it that makes the rest of the world feel very far away.

That mattered to me when I was there.

And it matters to Paige.

In Rainbow Season, she arrives in Panama after receiving the kind of news that divides your life into before and after. The future she thought she understood has disappeared, and she travels to a place completely removed from her ordinary life.

I wanted readers to feel that distance.

The winding roads.

The mountains.

The rain.

The feeling of waking up somewhere unfamiliar and realizing that, for at least a little while, nobody there knows the version of you that existed before you arrived.

There's freedom in that.

The Adventures Were Real—Even If Paige's Story Isn't

One of the most fun parts of writing Rainbow Season was taking experiences I actually had in Panama and asking:

What would happen if Paige were here instead of me?

The waterfall hike in the novel was inspired by a real hike.

And yes, there were ropes.

There were slippery rocks, rushing water, steep sections, and more than one moment when I questioned some of my vacation decision-making skills. 😂

The rafting scenes also grew from a real experience—including the raft overturning.

Volcán Barú is real.

The extraordinary resplendent quetzal is real.

The coffee, the lush mountainsides, the winding roads and the feeling of adventure waiting just beyond the resort gates—all of that came home with me.

But Rainbow Season isn't a memoir.

Paige is not me.

Her relationships, conversations, choices, and journey belong to her.

That's one of my favorite things about fiction: real places can hold entirely imagined lives.

I could take the sensory memories I carried home from Panama and build something new inside them.

The Place That Gave the Story Its Name

Of course, there is one image from Boquete that followed me home more than any other.

The rainbow.

I’ve already told the full story of that morning in “The Rainbow That Started It All”, so I won’t tell it again here. But what I didn’t know then was how much of Panama—not just that single moment—would eventually become part of Rainbow Season.

The rainbow may have given the novel its name, but Boquete gave it a world.

It gave me mist-covered mountains and rushing rivers. Waterfalls hidden at the end of muddy trails. Brilliant tropical birds. Winding roads disappearing into impossible shades of green. The strange combination of peace and adrenaline that comes from being very far from home and saying yes to things you aren't entirely sure you should be doing. 😂

Years later, when I began imagining where Paige might go after her life suddenly came apart, I didn't have to invent that place.

I already knew it.

What surprised me was how naturally the landscape became part of her emotional journey.

The mountains gave her something to climb.

The river knocked her off balance.

The unfamiliarity forced her out of the routines that had defined her.

And somewhere in all of that beauty and uncertainty, she began to see that perhaps the end of one life wasn't the end of her story.

The rainbow became the symbol.

But Panama became the place where Paige learned to look for what might come after the storm.

Why I Sent Paige There

I could have set Rainbow Season anywhere.

But Paige needed Boquete.

She needed to be somewhere unfamiliar enough that the routines and expectations of her old life couldn't follow her quite so easily.

She needed mountains to climb.

Waterfalls to reach.

A river capable of knocking her completely off balance.

She needed strangers who didn't know her history.

She needed moments that frightened her, surprised her, made her laugh, and reminded her that she was still very much alive.

And yes, she needed a rainbow.

Travel doesn't magically fix heartbreak. I don't think a plane ticket cures grief, betrayal, fear, or uncertainty.

But sometimes distance gives us enough quiet to hear ourselves again.

Sometimes doing something that scares us reminds us we're capable.

Sometimes standing somewhere completely unfamiliar makes us realize we aren't required to keep living exactly as we have before.

That is the version of travel I wanted in Rainbow Season.

Not escape.

Possibility.

The Strange Magic of Turning a Real Place Into Fiction

Writing Boquete was an unexpectedly emotional experience.

I would describe a road and remember being on it.

I'd write about the mountains and see photographs from my own trip in my mind.

I'd put Paige somewhere beautiful and remember what it felt like to stand there myself—not knowing that someday I would hand that place to a fictional woman who desperately needed it.

That's the strange magic of writing.

You live something once.

Then, years later, you sit at a computer and live it again—but this time, you get to decide what it means.

Boquete gave Rainbow Season its landscape. But more than that, it gave me a place where I could imagine a woman discovering that losing the future she'd planned didn't mean she'd lost her future altogether.

And perhaps that's why this little mountain town in Panama will always mean so much to me.

I went there during one chapter of my life.

I came home with the beginning of another.

I just didn't know yet that someday I'd call it Rainbow Season.

A Note From Tara

If Rainbow Season takes you somewhere you didn't expect when you read it, I hope you'll tell me. And if you've ever traveled somewhere that changed you—or arrived in a place as one version of yourself and somehow came home a little different—I would love to hear that story, too.

Rainbow Season, my debut women's fiction novel, is coming Fall 2026.