Panama Canal Cruise
Mike and Judy Henderson
April 11 to April 27, 2016
Some friends of ours had signed up for a Panama Canal Cruise and asked if we would like to accompany them. I (Mike) always had an interest in the Panama Canal, and wanted to cruise through it, so we accepted even though we had just taken a trip to Cuba in January.
Here's the cruise route. We start in San Diego and wind up in Miami, with stops along the way. There's a lot of sea time so we'll have to find things to do on board the ship.
Regarding the canal itself, I've been reading the book "The Path Between the Seas" by David McCullough. It's a thorough history of the building of the Panama Canal - too thorough. No detail is too small or insignificant to be omitted from his book. It would be nice to have a more concise story of the creation of the canal, but it's informative.
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4/11/2016 We depart today. Our friend, JT, arrived to take us to the Anaheim train station. He called me from the driveway and said, "Your Uber driver is here!" Side note: JT helped me harvest some honey recently. See here.
And here we are, ready to depart.
We're taking the Amtrak Surfliner train from Anaheim to San Diego (SAN station - last station on the line).
The Anaheim train station (Artic) is part of a general purpose transportation hub - it's fairly new and modern in design. Here's what it looks like from the back.
Our train came in right on time.
It was a very pleasant ride of about two and a half hours. The train runs along the ocean for almost half the distance so it's a beautiful trip. The San Diego train station is two blocks from the cruise ship depot so it was an easy walk to the ship.
The ship is the Celebrity Infinity. It's a big ship, 965 feet in length, with 2,170 passengers (and over 1,000 crew). The check in area was a madhouse with lines that were very long. I have to admit I'm not a big fan of these giant cruise ships for that very reason - there's just too much crowding everywhere you go on the ship.
Eventually, we were on board and got to our cabin. It's a nice size cabin, very adequate for our needs. Here's a view looking from the veranda area towards the cabin door.
And a view from the entry hall towards the veranda area. These pictures were taken a few days later.
About 5pm the ship began backing from her berth. Judy and I were in the 11th deck bar, right at the front of the ship. We watched it travel the channel to the open sea, accompanied by a very attentive pilot boat.
Here we are heading out to sea. Our first stop is Cabo San Lucas, which we won't reach for two days so we'll have to learn to enjoy shipboard life.
We had dinner with our friends. From left: Bill, Peter, Angela, Ulli, and Judy.
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4/12/2016 We're sailing along. We are in the Mountain time zone now, one hour earlier. Although I have Internet access on the ship, I've been unable to upload to my web server. Hopefully, I'll be able to do it tomorrow from Cabo San Lucas.
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4/13/2016 We dropped anchor at Cabo San Lucas about noon today and came in via tender. I'm sitting in a store while Judy shops - the store has WiFi.