November 3, 2009

We have arrived home and I have a few minutes to attach some photos from our Panama Canal passage. These photos were taken from the http://www.pancanal.com/ website webcam by our good friend, Brenda Rekenthaler, a wood carver freind from the Iowa State Fair.

She sent almost 50 photos of our ship progressing thru the canal.

Remember, these are photos that were taken from her computer screen! Great job, Brenda!

We passed thru the Miraflores Locks first:

Our ship is on the left - coming into the photo.
There are two sets of locks. We are going thru one set while the ship on the right is going thru the other one. We are both going into the interior lake.

There is one way traffic going into the locks each morning as there is not enough room for 2 ships to pass in the cut. So ships from the Pacific are headed into the lake while ships from the Atlantic are headed into the lake. Then the ships going opposite directions pass while in the large lake that is between the two sets of locks.

And away we go! Headed to the lake and then the Gatun Locks.

Here we are headed thru the Gatun Locks.





And away we go into the Atlantic Ocean!

Sunday, November 1, 2009

We are in Tampa! Arrived this morning and were some of the first ones off the ship. We are currently sitting in the Tampa airport waiting for a flight to Atlanta then on to Moline. Should arrive in Washington early evening. Will be good to get home.

We will try to update the blog with our last cruise. Have to admit that we didn't keep a good journal of the stops we made! But we did have a great time! Was fun to be with Bob's family!