Today, we travel through the Panama Canal, the highlight of this trip. We’re up early for the sunrise. It’s one of the few places geographically that the sun actually rises in the west and sets in the east. We will be traveling northwest in order to go east. Directionally, this place is all mixed up. There’s tons of statistics that I could pass on here but I don’t want to use up the space. I will tell you that our ship paid $259,000.00 to pass through the canal. We travel under two bridges, the Bridge of the Americas which connects North and South America and the Centennial Bridge that was constructed to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the completion of the Canal. The Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks lift us up 85 feet so that we can travel through the Gaillard Cut, the nine mile long, most narrow part of the 47 mile trip. Currently the Canal operates 24 hours a day and all traffic is inbound in the morning and outbound in the afternoon. Large ships pass each other in the second largest man made lake, Gatun Along the way, we view construction on the third and much wider series of locks for the post Panamax freighters, ships with beams wider than the 108 feet the current locks can accommodate. Finally, we are lowered back down to sea level by the Gatun locks and enter the Caribbean Sea.
Monday, January 12, 2009
The Panama Canal
Today, we travel through the Panama Canal, the highlight of this trip. We’re up early for the sunrise. It’s one of the few places geographically that the sun actually rises in the west and sets in the east. We will be traveling northwest in order to go east. Directionally, this place is all mixed up. There’s tons of statistics that I could pass on here but I don’t want to use up the space. I will tell you that our ship paid $259,000.00 to pass through the canal. We travel under two bridges, the Bridge of the Americas which connects North and South America and the Centennial Bridge that was constructed to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the completion of the Canal. The Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks lift us up 85 feet so that we can travel through the Gaillard Cut, the nine mile long, most narrow part of the 47 mile trip. Currently the Canal operates 24 hours a day and all traffic is inbound in the morning and outbound in the afternoon. Large ships pass each other in the second largest man made lake, Gatun Along the way, we view construction on the third and much wider series of locks for the post Panamax freighters, ships with beams wider than the 108 feet the current locks can accommodate. Finally, we are lowered back down to sea level by the Gatun locks and enter the Caribbean Sea.
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