Instructions: Click on the picture to move to the next in the series, or use the buttons located above the picture. There will be slight delay for each picture to appear as it is loaded from the website. "View Larger Picture" will pop up a new window with a larger version of the picture displayed.
The primary reason for this cruise, of course, was to transit the Panama Canal. Riding on a brand new, beautiful cruise ship was also an important goal. The photos here are an extensive record of our (exhausting) day, spent in the Canal. This is truly a cross-roads of the world, with many, many ships both in transit, and in port at either entrance. The engineering that made this canal is a marvel, and the setting is other-worldly. In some cases, the ships run alongside wild jungle, with no humans in sight. A website about that canal that may be of interest is: "http://www.panamacanal.com/map.htm".
Of course, we could not see or photograph a lot of our journey through the locks. We were fortunate that another ship was locking near us for some of the transit. The entire locking operation is pretty amazing, involving men and machines. This page contains the pictures we took as we were entering the Canal from the Caribbean, past Cristobol, and through the Gatun Locks into Gatun Lake.
These pictures were taken primarily with our (no longer) new Kodak DX6490, which we love. The 10x optical zoom is great, and the electronics do a fine job of automatic adjustment and flash operations.
NOTE that these photographs (with the exception of the Panama map) are Copyright 2005 Robert and Sandra Swanson. Enjoy the images, but please don't steal them!
More about the Kodak DX6490 at Steve's Digicam Review
**** If you can read this text, your browser is not supporting Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). You may be running a text-only browser, or perhaps an older browser version. It is also possible that you are have disabled Javascript (Netscape). If you wish to see this page with all formatting in place, upgrade your browser, and/or enable Javascript. Sorry for the inconvenience. ****