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Nice cruise!

We got back last Friday from our 10-day Panama Canal cruise.  It was a load of fun.  Took tons of pictures.  I even bought an underwater snapshot camera for my snorkel diving/catamaran trip in Aruba.  Once they are developed I'll scan in a couple and put them up on my website.

We went first to Holland America's private island in the Bahamas called Half Moon Cay.  Spent the whole day there and did a lot of walking on the beach and such.  For some strange reason, the water was fairly cold so we didn't do much swimming.

Had a day at sea - along with the usual 'formal night'.  When they say formal, they mean FORMAL. Tuxedo preferred, but a suit is OK also. Everyone gets dressed up for dinner. 

Next stop was Orangestad, Aruba.  Here the wife just vegetated onboard (her hip was bothering her quite a bit - no walking) but I walked over into town and ended up buying a really nice set of wireless earphones.  I can't normally use earphones because ones that cover my ears make my hearing aids whine - these had large enough ear cups so that they didn't whine at all.  Really nice. They run at 900Mhz or so and allow me to go completely outside the house and still listen.  These will be great next summer for lawn mowing.

Further travel the next day to Willemstad, Curacao.  Not really much to do here so we didn't sign up for any off-ship activities.  We walked around and took pictures, but the weather drove us back to the ship.  It was very hot and muggy.

We traveled to Colon, Panama the next day after transiting the Panama Canal's Gatun locks and going into Gatun Lake.  We anchored in the lake, which is 68 feet higher than the Atlantic, for about three hours and then went back out into the Atlantic.  I found out that it cost the ship $132,000 dollars just to transit the canal.  Woo!  That's a lot.

Next day we hit Limon, Costa Rica.  Since this is rain forest down here I expected rain, but not what we got. We had both signed up for what they called the "Caribbean Train and Eco boat ride".  Turned out that we had to walk in the rain to the busses (about 400 yards) then sit in seats that were smaller and more compressed than airline seats while we were taken to the Eco boat ride.  This ride was very good picture-wise but not very good because the seats on the boat were even smaller than the ones on the bus.  The boat skipper seemed to have a NASCAR bent so he went charging down the river in spurts and then chopping the throttle while the guide pointed out howler monkeys, birds, snakes and caymans.  Trash littered the banks of the river which kind of spoiled the "eco" effect. The train trip was really terrible.  Small, cramped wooden coaches marked with graffitti and being pulled with a stinky little diesel engine.  Between the boat trip and the train was another long bus trip (same bus).  When we got to the end of the train trip it just stopped right beside a very busy highway and we had to practically jump from the train steps to the bus door.  Then, after another 15 minutes of bus travel we ended up at a Del-Monte banana plantation/processing plant.  This was kinds of cool in a strange way.  The workers come in from the trees pulling a "train" of linked banana bunches sometimes as long as 100M. This is done on a cable that is done up like a cablecar in the mountains so that the bunches ride over the support wires.  Once they dock the train, they individually pull in each bunch and weigh it.  They get moved next to the "inspector" who culls out bad ones and passes the bunch to the washer.  Once washed off, they are packed in the boxes you see at the supermarket.  A very involved process.  Off to the dock again now and back to the ship.  Another 400 yard walk in driving rain.

The next two days were just fine - both days at sea.  We relaxed on deck and did whatever the hell we wanted.  I mostly read and the wife went down and played bingo.  We had another formal night also.

We pulled back into Fort Lauderdale on the 23rd after having a nice Thanksgiving dinner the night before.

Current mood: Tired, very tired


New Adventure - stay tuned

On Sunday the wife and I head down to Fort Lauderdale for a nice 10-day cruise on our old friend Holland America.  This time we travel to the Panama Canal and various places in Northern South America like Aruba and Puerto Colon.

This trip will get us out of the unseasonably cold snap we have been having here in Ohio lately.  Temperatures down to the mid-thirties during the night.  We get up the next morning and have frost on the cars.  Looks like winter will be on us faster than we think.

I have decided not to take my laptop this trip, but, instead, bought a 2GB memory card for my camera.  According to the LCD screen I can take 634 pictures on it in decent size, JPG format.  That should be sufficient for my needs. One of my pet peeves with digital cameras was that all the pictures went into one "folder" on the memory card.  After reading the manual (yes, I do read manuals) I found that there was a menu item letting me create a new folder whenever I wanted.  This way, I don't have to guess where the picture was shot but can create a new folder for each port.  The menu also offers a selection of created folders if you want to go back to a previous one.  Pretty slick I guess. Problem is that the camera picks the folder name and doesn't let me do it.  At least I will have separate folders for each group -- if I remember what folder goes with which port.  Sigh.

 

Current mood: Ready for the trip