2005 Panama Canal Cruise -- July 4th at Sea
[Javascript Photo Album]
![[Pride of America Photo]](pics/dotc.gif)
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.
Since this ship was the first American-flagged passenger ship to be built and launched in many decades, we assumed that the American-themed style would be reflected in a big celebration on July 4th. There were a few events, primarily a very late-night poolside "party", but we were dismayed by the low-key nature of the celebration.
So, we tried to liven things up a bit. First of all, we had pre-planned to decorate our cabin door with a patriotic display, and packed some special equipment for our own "Uncle Sam" to parade around the ship. In the end, the cruise staff at least threw a "party" late at night on the 4th. At least they handed out flags to the passengers. We saw only one other group of passengers dressed up for the holiday. Note that the 4th was celebrated at sea. We had left Costa Rica on the 2nd, and weren't going to be near land again until the 6th, nearly 4 days at sea. Would have been a perfect time to get the passengers' imaginations fired up for the big event.
It was actually rather hard to find patriotic July 4th decorations on Maui. We were looking in early June, but most stores had nothing. Later in the month, they would make a lot of money selling safe fireworks, but that seems to be the limit. Next time, we'll get things by mail order well before the cruise!
These pictures were taken primarily with our (now not so) 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 are Copyright 2005 Robert and Sandra Swanson. Enjoy the images, but please don't steal them!
More Links
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. ****