Panama Canal on Island Princess 10/17-11/1 Photo Review

Princess sent an email out a couple weeks prior to this cruise announcing a change in port times for today due to the tides. Instead of 7AM to 7PM it was now scheduled for 10AM to 10PM. We had booked a private tour with Tiquicia Tours and were able to reschedule our start time for 10:30AM before we left home. When we first woke up this morning, I headed out on the balcony to check out today's view in hopes of seeing some ocean life. I was soon rewarded with the sight of several baby dolphins jumping in and out of the wake along the side of the ship near the aft. I yelled out and pointed and heard several shouts of “Dolphins? Where?!” from nearby balconies followed by “Oh, aww!” Dad ran out still in his pajamas to try and see but unfortunately for him and for any hope of getting that moment on camera, the dolphins had decided by then to move on.

The line of "gunk" we soon unearthed as we approached port:

With extra time this morning, we decided to attend the Morning Trivia Challenge session at 9:15AM so we headed down by 8AM to Sabatinnis for breakfast. While we were seated quickly and immediately given the orange juice we prefer, it was like we didn't exist after that. I don't know if it was because we were seated in the far corner which isn't easily visible from the host's podium but we were frequently passed by as the wait staff went into the back to retrieve items for other diners. Each time we tried to catch someone to get service, they just smiled and kept on walking. We never saw the pastry tray or drink refills. Finally got someone to take our order and I ordered a bagel and some sausage as by then we feared being late if I ordered anything more complex. Took another 30 minutes just to get our food and I wolfed it down.

We ran back up to the cabin to grab our stuff for today's tour expecting to have to head out as soon as trivia was over and made it to the Explorer's lounge for trivia when it was already three questions in. The topic was TV themed questions and some of my new group of trivia friends gladly took us into their group. We missed only three questions and only one of them was for a show I'd actually seen. A lot of people give me questionable looks when I can answer trivia questions about the most obscure television shows, especially ones they wouldn't expect someone of my age to be watching. When a good part of your work day is posting news to a TV themed website, you find yourself knowing more than you ever wanted to. Add to that years of working in elementary classrooms and I still cringe when I hear “Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” This time my random knowledge paid off in the form of keychain flashlights.

Trivia was over sooner than we expected so we returned to the cabin to watch our arrival into port from the balcony.

This was the first port that I noticed a note included on the front page of the Patter “asking” guests who want to go ashore but aren't on a ship tour to meet on Deck 6 and wait until a staff member there decides that the gangway has cleared enough to escort the guests assembled down to the gangway.

This picture is from Aruba day but the message content was the same:

Once we heard the official docking announcement, we just made our way downstairs and melded in with the crowd currently waiting to be dinged out. Once off the gangway itself, the costumed crew members who try to make you pose for photos must not have been having much luck because when we got there, the female crew member dressed in this lovely colorful flowing dress literally threw up the sides of her dress to prevent us from walking past. We spotted our photo in the gallery later and all you could see was half my head and one shoulder around her skirt block. Maybe that's what our football offensive front line needs to help stop the defense!

Puntarenas features a very long pier and they were working to back in a couple buses at a time for excursions. We walked the long length of the pier until finally reaching these tall gates. What stood behind those gates was like the paparazzi meets a flashback to that Walking Dead attraction at Universal Studios. The space was mobbed with people offering private tours! Several had binders full of pictures that they were holding up to entice passengers. “Look at the beaches, look at the flowers, look at the nice van I have!” As we pushed through the crowd, one man stepped in front of me blocking my path to try and get me to book with him but soon backed off when I told him we'd already made arrangements. We soon found our guide/driver for today named Pablo and he walked us over to Greivin, his boss whom we 'd communicated over email with to plan this tour. It was nice to see that the boss took time to greet us and ask us to come let him know how it was when we returned to the pier. This tour only cost us $80 per person and we booked our own because we didn't feel comfortable doing the narrow suspension bridges that were part of the bigger tour offered on our roll call. Dad was so shocked that it was so cheap that he expected them to try and change their offer when we got there. No such issue and Pablo was very nice and professional.

Pablo had a little trouble getting his van to start but soon we were on our way. One of the big highlights of this trip was the first stop on our tour. Pablo drove us to a family's small homestead where they have Capuchin monkeys hanging out in the trees that will come down and walk across your arms and shoulders knowing that there will be food. The large tour buses aren't allowed as this property is off in a tucked away place so according to them, the big ship excursions can't even offer this experience as part of their tours. Pablo instructed us to hold our arms out at our sides and the monkeys would come down off the trees, walk up one arm, across our neck/head, and down the other arm. The monkeys gladly took food from you, their favorites being cookies.

I don't know why I have a picture like this but it's got an eerie beautiful quality to it:

Dad holding out his arm to invite a cute visitor:

Dad's enjoying himself but the poor monkey looks a little seasick at being offered a banana:

Really? You gave him a banana to give me Pablo? Where's the cookies?

Ahh yes there's the cookies!

Look who's Mr. Popular now!

I had thought ahead on the way there to tuck my lanyard hanging cruise card inside my shirt but Dad even had one of the monkeys grab his lanyard and try to take off with it.

Hmm, what's that around your neck?

Hey, why did you take it back?

Pablo crushed a cookie into my hand and one of the monkeys climbed across my shoulders, stretched himself out to my wrist, and licked the crumbs out of my hand.

We saw a baby monkey being carried on his mom's back and even one enjoying riding on the tire swing they'd hung from one of the trees.

One of the monkeys definitely acted like the alpha male and would get jealous whenever some of the other monkeys would come down to get some food too. He would scream and chase the other monkey back up into the tree. For this part of our tour, we ended up at the same place as Eric and our other roll call members who'd booked the full tour.

After riding through some back roads in a neighborhood that included several piles of burning leaves and trash in a failed effort to spot macaws, our next stop was to a boat ride to view crocodiles and several bird species. Several tour companies run out of the same dock side by side so when we met our guide he joked to head down to the left where his boat will be the one without the holes in it. Our ride was run by Jose's Crocodile River Tour and we had to stand around for about 10-15 minutes because a few other tour groups had booked this as well but hadn't shown up yet.

The wait becomes a little more bearable when a lizard wanders across the path in front of you:

We watched a large shuttle bus pull up and several people got out to take pictures with a Flat Stanley character next to the company sign on the next dock. Finally, they let us go and at least sit down in the boat while we waited and I took Pablo's advice of sitting on the left side as you're facing the boat.

The side this young lady is pictured standing in front of gives the best views.

As it turns out, one of the other large private tour shuttle buses that next pulled up was from one of those tours you can book if you want a smaller group experience. As they boarded the boat, we recognized Dave from our mini-Olympics games. Dave asked if we'd also been riding around looking for macaws so there must be a set group of things every tour group visits.

One of our first sightings along the banks:

Our guide was very knowledgeable about the types of birds and wildlife we would see during the tour and used a green laser pointer to help point out those cleverly camouflaged lizards sunning themselves along the dirt banks. When we first started the ride, a medium sized log was spotted in the middle of the water leading some people to react thinking it was a crocodile. Our guide laughed it off by referring to the sighting as their own species of “logodile.”

It didn't take long to start seeing some new friends who weren't so camera shy:

He joked that the boat driver was nicknamed 9 fingers and several times the driver stopped the boat and got out to splash chicken meat along the bank to entice the crocodiles to come over towards the boat.

Cheese!

Strike a pose:

You can see the green laser pointer our guide used in this pic:

Is there a crocodile version of the Jaws theme music:

The first bird with a combover:

Oops, guess he took offense at my critique:

At one point I realized that the driver was barefoot as he wandered in to ankle deep water at times and suggested his name might be changing to 9 toes next. They had named all of the crocodiles after famous people including their biggest one named Osama Bin Laden. We pulled over by a large dirt patch that extended far out into the water and our driver got out to throw extra meat out to the birds. We laughed when one of the birds reacted just like our earlier monkey chasing everyone else away.

"Here crocky crocky"

"You rang?"

Chicken fingers or your toes Mr. Boat Driver:

Good choice sir!

This crocodile had been sickly and didn't do much anymore other than lay in the sun:

As we finished our boat ride, the clouds started to darken the sky.

Thankfully it didn't start raining until we were back in the van but it didn't rain for long. Pablo returned to the neighborhood in hopes of now seeing the macaws but I guess they weren't in the mood to be seen today. Next we drove up this long winding narrow road up the side of a mountain to where a super expensive and exclusive eight room hotel sits because Pablo wanted to show us the panoramic view. Along the way, he pointed out a couple of the suspension bridges we would have been walking across if we'd gone with the other tour and Dad and I both agreed we made the right choice for us. Pablo pulled over by the road's guardrail that overlooked this view of the city expecting us to get out for pictures but we elected to partake of the camera's zoom feature from the van.

Earlier in the tour, we had driven past a factory building where they produce the souvenirs sold in the shops around the island and Pablo advised that they were the best place to buy from to get a deal. But by this point in the tour, we were wiped out so we told him that we didn't need to stop for shopping. We drove almost all the way back to the pier when Pablo asked if we really wanted to be done as he still had a drive through some small town on the agenda. We assured him that we'd seen everything we'd wanted to already and he dropped us off back at the gates. Thankfully by now, the pier was running a trolley style shuttle from the gate to the ship so we didn't have to walk the whole stretch again.

Once back on board, we ventured to Horizon Court to check out their offerings since we never got lunch during the tour. Loved the sandwich making station and the variety of bbq and roasted chicken pieces. Ran into Assistant Cruise Director Matt getting his lunch from the buffet and stopped to say hello.

After we'd regained our energy with some sustenance, we headed down to play afternoon trivia. Chuck and Bonnie from our progressive team joined our group this afternoon and when it came time to score, he insisted we switch with a certain group that he thought might have fudged their score in a previous game. In order to do so, we ended up switching between the few teams playing about four times over. Once again, we revealed our scores by cheering/clapping for who got what as the score count got higher and soon we were the only ones still clapping. Just as we were about to be named the winners, another team (not the one we'd checked) pipes up to say that their score hadn't been tallied right and now that it was, their score was really higher than ours. After the game, we enjoyed socializing with our new trivia friends sharing stories of the different unique tours and experiences we'd all gotten to do on trips.

Finally we ventured over to check out today's Elite etc cocktail hour where the theme offering of the day was goat cheese presented in a tower made of pieces looking like they were formed from a melon baller. I'd never really tried goat cheese and found that it tasted like a saltier cream cheese. Who doesn't love the combination of salty and creamy?

With time to sit still after our long day, we retreated to the cabin for some down time before dinner.

I don't think I could ever sail without at least a balcony cabin so I can enjoy views like these:

With the open seating, we weren't able to get our usual table 69 but in order to be seated quickly we agreed to go with a table near where our original waitress worked. This time we had a sweet waitress and her assistant both from the Philippines. They worked great as a team and I had talked up the spaghetti carbonara so much that Dad got it as his appetizer. It was yummy but could have used more cheese. Our waitress loved to chat and was so interested about our tour that it was hard to get time to eat. We finally had to make our excuses and leave in order to make it to Name That Tune Broadway on time.

Dad and I split up in order for me to get down to trivia on time. Dad wasn't sure he wanted to participate so I went ahead and joined our new friends' team filling out their maximum per team count. Soon Dad did come down to join us so he teamed up with our original trivia teammates. Despite our teammate Tony jokingly shouting out several answers as he ran up to turn in our paper slips (he wanted to help out his smoking buddy that was part of the neighboring team) we got 2nd place. 1st place went to a team who knew every single song clip including the one no one else seemed to know from the musical “Chess.”

We stuck around for the “Yes/No” game and a few of our group, Tony, Ann, and Rich chose to participate. Rich is competitive and it really got to him to have lost this game so quickly. Ann got tripped up by concentrating so hard on not saying yes at the beginning of her answer that she involuntarily added it to the end of her answer. Instead of answering “Did you have a nice time in port?” with “Yes I did,” she replied “I did have a nice time in port, yes.” One of the guys who did really well sounded like he should be an announcer on the radio named Allan and won by giving long drawn out answers to Matt and Armando's simple questions using up the three minutes of time. Gary from our original trivia teammates also opted to play and won. A sweet lady was so flustered during her turn on stage that she seemed really out of it when answering. (We rode up in the elevator afterwards with her and her friends and she was so worried that she'd embarrassed herself.) Matt let one of her “uhhuh” answers slide so she also won a bottle of champagne like the others. They had only so many passengers sign up to participate that Matt and Armando turned the tables and let Gary and Allan question them instead. Matt didn't last very long but Armando survived the three minutes. Matt joked that he'd never be able to show his face again after only lasting 10 seconds.

Back to the cabin for a shower and another turn of the clocks forward one hour before bed.

Essentially the same daily activities as every other sea day. Things were a little rockier though as we were sailing on the outskirts of a rainstorm.

The proverbial barf bags were left tucked into the railings along the elevator banks. Not quite the Halloween decorations I was expecting.

Headed off to breakfast at Sabatinnis and decided to try getting them to make a fried egg the way I like it, with an essentially solid no run yolk in the middle. What I got was a fried egg with a slow river of yolk when cut into which the waitress had me do in front of her to be sure it was okay. I admitted that it wasn't what I had been picturing and she offered to cook it longer but it wasn't worth the bother. I do think that this particular cruise owned stock in pepper grinders or had some sort of quota to meet because everything we had in any restaurant was offered to be topped with fresh grated pepper. Dad loved getting the pepper grated and I usually agreed as well if it was a dish that made sense for pepper. I do like to sprinkle some pepper on my eggs at home so I agreed when the waitress offered this morning. However, for some reason it was more like the old gag of partially unscrewing the top of the salt shaker as my little fried eggs had so much pepper come out of that grinder that my first couple bites were like whatever the pepper equivalent is of a salt lick. Rather than have a new plate made, I just ate the side items I'd ordered.

Off to our next session of Morning Progressive Trivia only to find that Oliver and his wife didn't show. As it turned out, we got the best score today that we'd gotten all voyage long. A small group stuck around afterwards for Panama Trivia so we merged the present players from all our trivia groups into one and won the game.

Rushed upstairs to the Lotus Spa Pool where today's Mini-Olympic game was golf chipping into the pool. DJ Delite hosted the game and had tied three hoops together and to the railings at the opposite end across the width of the pool. We had to shoot our chip shots from the deck which meant having to not only clear up and over the outer wading section of the pool but then also have it land within one of the hoops. This day, we had the extra golf hazard of trying to aim our golf balls into hoops that were riding the wave back and forth from just inside the pool to all the way to the outer wading section on the other side due to the pool water being sloshed around by the rockiness of the ship. A couple people did make it into the hoops and at least one made it into the pool only for it to be within the hoop as the next wave pushed the hoops back into the pool. Dad made it into the hoop one time and I continued my streak of zero points!

We had decided to try when Sabatinnis turns into Alfredos for lunch on sea days and with some time to kill before Battle of the Sexes, we headed back down to deck 7 only to find that they weren't open yet. We sat on the couch to wait and as we sat there, at least 20 people formed a line in front of the doors. After noticing that a good portion of them were together as large groups, we knew that we'd never get fast enough service to be done in time for our next trivia. We changed our plans to return here after Battle of the Sexes and instead visited the buffet with our free time to grab a snack.

As the Battle of the Sexes trivia was about to start, Chad announced that he'd used his “own precious Internet minutes” to look up a lorry on Wikipedia and it described the bird as the men's answer of parrots as well as some specific kind of parakeet and because of that, the ladies wouldn't be getting the point. He did however fix our total number of answers correct tally but without credit for that answer, we still lost that previous round. During Battle of the Sexes, the ladies had everyone waiting on us to turn in our answer sheet because we kept debating on two questions. We ended up losing the round because one of the questions we had been debating, “What country's flag features segments representing the four seasons?” was correctly answered by one guy who'd suggested “Oh I don't know, I know South Korea's flag has a lot of stuff on it so put that!”

Returned to Alfredos after trivia and it was mostly empty. We had only been waiting for our order for a little while when the host came over and started profusely apologizing about the delay as they'd put our pizzas in the far back of the oven where it was hottest and they burned. He assured us that the pizzas normally take about 3 minutes to cook so they'd be out shortly. Dad got a pepperoni pizza (they come about the size of a dinner plate and yield 4 wedge style slices) and I ordered the Margarita style so we could try some of each other's pizza. Much better food and service experience than when we first tried Alfredos as a stand alone restaurant on a previous ship.

I decided that since the slots themselves in the casino weren't so forthcoming, I'd get my slots fix by using the other casino tournament BOGO entry coupon to play in today's slots tournament. My first play earned me a spot in last place on the leaderboard. My second try got nothing but a complimentary boo from the casino host. Dad had watched me participate in the tournament and was sure he'd figured out the way to beat the machine – waiting until the screen graphics had stopped completely before hitting the spin button again – so he purchased a whole other casino tournament entry just to show off how his theory was going to help him win big. He failed completely during his turn and by the time he was done, my name had been knocked off the board.

Dad decided that he needed a break from bridge this afternoon as he normally only gets to play one day a week at home and instead used the time to shower as he'd decided that we should attend the Captain's Circle party tonight. We've been invited in the past but never bothered to go. Once we both had changed into our formal attire, we headed down to the routine afternoon trivia session as the party was right after trivia. Because Explorers was being used for the party, they moved the trivia back to Wheelhouse Bar. By now we had such a large group of trivia playing friends that we had to split up ourselves into two groups and had our own side competition going on. It was during this trivia that Ann had been served her soda in a glass that after a few sips, she realized it still had the previous user's lipstick on it. She reported it to the nearest bar waiter who wanted to know who'd served her a dirty glass. Ann pointed out the female bar waitress that was across the room and this bar waiter kind of rolled his eyes and reacted like he wasn't surprised to hear that it was her. He took away the glass and brought her a fresh drink, this time with a straw. Soon after, the female bar waitress came back over and asked about the dirty glass blaming it on the dish washing machines not always getting everything clean. Neither of our two teams ended up winning the trivia. The one team who knew that “eructation” was the fancy way of saying belching won.

They had split up the different groups of Captain's Circle party attendees by giving them different times listed on the invites. When we mentioned it to Chuck and Bonnie earlier in the day Chuck argued with us about when the party started because his invite had the later time. They had redecorated the Explorers lounge with a red carpet and ropes adding to the “exclusive” vibe. Armando greeted us at the lounge entrance dressed in his suit and we handed over our invitations. The place was already pretty packed but they had several uniformed officers and cruise entertainment staff dressed up greeting passengers like a receiving line as we walked in. DJ Delite had his back to me conversing with a seated passenger so I snuck up behind him and whispered “Boo” in his ear.

One of the few remaining seats we could find was the couch that was all the way in the back corner off to the side of the lounge where the Elite etc cocktail hour was held. Just like RCL's suite guest reception, bar staff circulated offering a small assortment of drinks or you could request something else. I went with a dirty banana and dad got one of the few alcoholic drinks he likes, a brandy alexander. A small offering of finger food style snacks was passed out by waiters that mostly consisted of random fillings for tiny fried bites. I tried one of each, you know for research purposes.

My dirty banana and fried snacks:

Dad's Brandy Alexander:

Cruise Director Mike kicked off the festivities by announcing that the captain was too busy on the bridge to attend the party tonight. Mike softened the announcement by adding “I'm sure you all would rather he be working up there keeping us safe and sailing along anyway.” Then the Captain's Circle rep took the stage to announce the names of the top three most traveled passengers. Only one of them was in attendance at our party and he came up onstage to accept a small gift bag.

Then the rep drew three invitations out of the box on the stage for people to win a bottle of the nicer champagne as a sort of door prize. First name gets called, everyone cheers, and they raise their hands so one of the cruise staff can run over their bottle. Second name gets called and the process repeats. As the rep makes a big deal over pulling out the third and final name, I got a weird feeling that after all the “champoo” we've been winning and giving away, watch one of our names get called. She draws out reading the cabin number first...”From C” Hmm.. “7” Umm, okay. “0” No, could she really have pulled ours? “4, Ms. Danielle!” Dad starts cracking up laughing and we were so far stuck in the back corner that half the room on our side had to get her attention to where I was. She handed the bottle to Armando to run over and it took him so long to weave his way back there that I emphatically threw up my hands and called out “Come to me, Armando!” The whole room laughed and Armando actually started rushing faster over to me with a big grin on his face! Lots of congratulations from nearby passengers but Dad and I could only laugh at the irony of how we'd never actually want to drink it, even if it was “the real stuff.”

This sucker was heavy to carry:

We enjoyed chatting with the nearby passengers until the Captain's Circle rep actually got back on the mike to announce that they needed to clean up and get ready for party #2 and eventually resorted to the nicer way of saying get out when no one really bothered to move.

We ran back up to the cabin just to drop off the bottle of champagne and found Lusioto in the middle of turning down our cabin for the evening. He congratulated us when we mentioned the win and we went right back out to let him finish his work. We made our way down to the almost packed theater to catch the early show by Lorenzo Clark that was described as “comedy & magic.” Some of his one liner style jokes were funny and the one trick he did at the end to build on an earlier “is this your card?” that didn't seem to work right at the time were good but the rest of his tricks were lame. He seemed more on par with a bad children's party magician. Apparently he was the epitome of entertainment to the woman in the row behind us because she hysterically laughed if Lorenzo so much as blinked.

Since we were already at the front of the ship, we headed straight down to the dining room for our standing reservation. The host though was so busy that when he saw us, he just said “You still want table #69? Yes? Okay, than you know where it is.” And off we went to our little oasis in the sea of large tables. Our assistant waiter Pedro seemed a little distracted tonight though as he brought up a tray stacked high with several tables worth of entrees, delivered them to the big tables and left the soup we'd ordered sitting there on the tray. Our actual entrees were soon delivered and our head waiter Berin didn't even question why there was still two soup bowls sitting there as he worked to consolidate the dirty dishes on their workstation. Dad didn't want to bring it up so we didn't bother asking for replacement soup orders. Dad was happy to see Rocky Road offered as one of tonight's ice cream choices but was disappointed when it turned out to be chocolate ice cream and something like walnuts or hazelnuts as the only two ingredients.

We returned to the cabin where Dad got ready for bed and relaxed reading his latest e-book but I changed back into my casual clothes waiting on 10PM to go check out the stargazing session. I love astronomy, especially being able to see the night sky at sea, so when I saw this activity first listed on our Alaska sailing I was ecstatic. That evening though it was deemed too cloudy and spitting rain off and on so they ushered us all into the wedding chapel instead where one of the cruise staff used his computer program hooked up to the big screen to give a long lecture about mythology and who named which constellation based on which story etc. Let's just say, I hope I didn't snore too loudly because once they made it pitch black in the room all I saw was the back of my eyelids. Fast forward to this cruise with nicer weather this evening and I was raring to go. By 9:45PM I was nodding off on the couch so I gave up on the idea of stargazing and headed to bed early.

Totally enjoying this!! I love our sense of humor..seems a bit like mine :D

Thank you for taking the time and effort to do this! Looking forward to some more!!

Totally enjoying this!! I love our sense of humor..seems a bit like mine :D

 

Thank you for taking the time and effort to do this! Looking forward to some more!!

Aww, thank you! I was beginning to wonder if anyone was still reading this saga. Coming up, Panama Canal day!

Side note: I know the topic of chair hogs and seat savers is a hot button topic for cruisers. While I saw mostly people using the loungers to sun and read rather than just leaving their stuff, I also didn't see any one going around checking and removing items. This is the first time I've noticed a time limit warning mentioned in the Patter.

The day we initially booked this cruise for is here! Part of me had been thinking though, we've experienced so much already that I'd been excited to do, I can't believe we hadn't even gotten to the Canal yet! Today's Patter included a great breakdown of the schedule for when we approximately were to reach each point of the transit on the front page. I kept a copy of the Patter folded up with that chart showing in my pocket as I moved throughout the ship this day and answered several people's questions about our timeline.

Dad had already visited the Panama Canal on a Road Scholar trip that had him actually staying in Panama, exploring the locks and riding through one on a small boat with the guy in charge of the locks. So this morning, he stayed in bed while I was up at 4:30AM to wander around getting pictures while things were still quiet. It's an eerie feeling walking through the ship's public spaces at such an early hour. It's so spooky quiet that you almost feel tempted to tiptoe like you're sneaking around and might get caught. This is when I used the opportunity to grab several random pictures of the ship's interior with no one around.

The only time Crooners wasn't packed:

Our Oktoberfest decorations had been exchanged for Panamanian (?) themed banners:

I honestly don't remember noticing these palm trees before this morning:

I had to show Dad this hallway later to make sure I wasn't imagining the weird incline towards the end:

The center level of the atrium where many games of chance err.. skill were played:

How handy to feature tablets at the shore excursion desk so you can book your own tour without waiting in line:

The library - a frequently used place to read and occasionally nap:

Churchill lounge a.k.a. smoking lounge - There were about 6 more seats around the perimeter of this room but I couldn't stand the smell to stick around for long. There was also times when you could smell it while walking past a certain couple walls in the library:

No wait for the elevator this morning:

How handy of them to have an ATM positioned right outside the casino:

Photo gallery displays all folded up looking back toward Explorer's Lounge:

Not only will the cruise food make you feel weighted down, so does the gym scale chained to the wall. Do they really expect someone to fit that in their carry on luggage?

I then moved to the Promenade deck outside where the sun was just starting to come up. I happened to be on the right side to catch the ship's photography team being loaded off into a small boat so that they could be on land to take pictures of all those people who made signs throughout the first part of the voyage. The material to make signs was set up in the photo department and several people were there nearly every time we passed by. Yesterday, they moved the table and supplies to the atrium and it was like a kid waiting until the night before to do their report as the place was mobbed.

Off goes the pilot boat:

As the sun came up, you could see how many ships were waiting in line to go through the canal. We were told that some ships even wait weeks for their turn.

A cloudy haze hung low over the area creating a beautiful view of the skyscrapers, some lit like a spotlight and others in shadow.

I'm a sucker for sunrise/sunset photos so here's a few favorites from this morning:

I worked my way up to the sun deck forward only to find that even this early, the place was packed three levels deep. I'd heard from someone later that people had slept up there on those loungers in order to get a front viewing spot. Enjoy your reward of those blue glass tinted photos!

I walked around the outside decks trying to find some spot along the rail that wasn't blocked and eventually found the small alcove on the port side just off the Horizon Court. The glass was clear and it provided a great view of the Bridge of Americas and the front of the ship entering the locks.

As we passed under the bridge:

It also is a prime spot for catching the perfect view of the new locks as we passed them on the left just before approaching our first lock.

A cargo ship heading through the new locks:

Several people came and went as I stood there, either on their way to the buffet or also in search of pictures and we had a great system going of rotating in and out so each person could get their picture. At one point, a couple came in to check out the view so I stepped back to let them have a chance. The wife said something to the husband in a different language. He left and soon came back with a chair and the two of them shared the chair sitting in front of the window. A couple ladies who'd rotated with me earlier came back for more pictures and complained loudly about the rude couple now blocking the view. Magically, they could now speak English as the husband replies “We are not tall people, you can take a picture over us!” Our further protests were ignored until eventually they got bored and left the chair behind. I took the chair back into the buffet.

How easy it was to take pictures "over them"

Another angle of the bridge as we went under:

Wait for me!

Hong Kong cargo ship and his tugboat friend is in place to the left so we headed for the right side:

Our neighboring lock before the cargo ship from Hong Kong moved up:

I am continuing to enjoy looking at your great pictures.....:):):)

Bob

Totally enjoying this!! I love our sense of humor..seems a bit like mine :D

 

 

 

Thank you for taking the time and effort to do this! Looking forward to some more!!

I agree!!!

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This guy walked across the gates shortly before they opened for us:

This guy on the bridge was just checking to see if the old Miraflores Locks museum building needed a new roof:

Tough day on the job for the canal employees:

Our mules hard at work:

Peek a boo, I found Eric and his wife from our roll call again!

Taking a picture of the canal workers taking a picture of us:

Hey, our canal mate is getting away! Follow them!

The pictures featuring the neighboring lock after we'd entered and the Miraflores building were all taken from the perspective of our cabin balcony. I moved back to our balcony once the alcove got too popular. Dad was awake by then so we headed down to Sabatinnis for breakfast, enjoying the view from there while we ate. Afterwards, I wanted to walk the Promenade deck again to get pictures from a different perspective so we walked down to the nearest exit door.

I reached for the knob on the inside just as a couple ladies were reaching for the knob on the outside and the whole knob broke off in each of our hands! A crew member was working on the outside deck nearby so we handed over the handles to him and he left the door propped open so it wouldn't lock in the meantime.

Oops, something's missing!

Inside view:

Outside view:

As we walked along the Promenade deck, we came upon a medical evacuation from our ship in progress. Out of respect, while we did stay and watch as the passenger was loaded into the ambulance, I only took this one picture before the passenger was visible:

Does anyone know what these orange ribbons signified? We only saw them for the latter part of the voyage and only hanging from certain lifeboats/tenders.

I took Dad back upstairs to show him the little alcove spot I'd found earlier and by now it was packed as was the front windows of the Horizon Court.

Catching up!