Panama Canal Transit Part 5

To see the earlier posts about our transit through the canal, click here.
We head out from the Pedro Miguel locks for the last leg of the transit.
We're cruising through what's called the Gaillard Cut...everything was so green.
We sneaked into the Queen's Lounge to listen to some of the entertainers practicing their songs. I perched on a window seat and sang along with the woman who was singing "There's A Place For Us" from West Side Story. Actually, they didn't mind that a few people were in the theater listening to them rehearse.
There were huge cranes all along the Bay of Panama near the Pacific entrance to the canal, waiting to load and unload containers.
It takes approximately fifteen hours to traverse the canal through its three sets of locks (about half the time is spent waiting due to traffic). Since ours was a partial transit, we didn't go through the Gatun locks, but turned around and came back to the Pacific. This saved us the cost of a plane flight back home from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Most people chose this partial rather than full transit for the same reason.
We cruised back under the Bridge of the Americas.
Good-bye Panama City.
Nearly every night our room steward made a different towel animal to entertain us, propped up on our bed. I think this one was a duck-billed platypus.
I'm dressed for dinner in the dining room, one flight up from our room. We never took the elevator the entire cruise, even when we carried our luggage down three flights to disembark in Long Beach. That was because we were trying to burn the extra calories we were consuming every day...but still I gained 5 pounds! We couldn't resist the delectable food available to everyone.

I highly recommend doing a Panama Canal cruise. This was the most interesting cruise we have been on so far. You can find great deals on cruises at Vacations to Go. We have gotten good deals through them.