Panama Canal Transit

"The Path Between the Seas" by Daved McCullough is an excellent, accurate and readable history of the struggle by the French and the US to build the Panama Canal.

Yesterday Dick and I hung out on our balcony all day (about 12 hours) to view the passage. What an awesome, beautiful, brillant big of engineering and a testament to human intelligence and dogged perseverance.

We went through the canal in 2002 and were able to see quite a few changes. There is now a huge bridge (for those in Delaware it is similiar in construction to the one over the CD canal), the big ditch through the Culebra cut is much wider and there are new locks being built. There are also alot of new skyscrapers in Panama City and more antennas on the numerous hills.

The part that struck me were the passengers on board. All of us had red sun touched faces and arms. We all walked around the ship last night in a happy, dazed, awed, and tired .It's hard work hanging over a balcony on a ship ordering room service for breakfast, lunch and dinner, guzzeling water, toasting the canal with champagne, wave at the tug boat workers, and stare at the dozens of huge cargo ships from China , cheer the passengers on the Van Gogh a cruise shiop that went throught the canal with us. I think the most fun was at the last lock before the exit to the Pacific. A new four story pavalion has been built and each gallery facing the canal was packed with folks that came just to watch our ship go through the canal. Our ship is so huge that the crowd gave four sections of a rousing cheer to us as we slowly went past. Of course we all hooted and hollered back and it was a very festival feeling. A very sharing, happy feeling. I did my best to do an Evita Peron imitation from my balcony (that Dick captured on the camera) and I got to exercise my hoot that I perfected as my kids went through years of sport and drama, band and other activities that needed a cheering section. Dick just laughs at me with pleased amusement.