Now the Panama Canal is such an awesome place I know just right from the beginning that I won’t do it justice in this post. But here I go with my best attempt.
We picked this year’s vacation because we’ve talked about going to the Panama Canal a couple of years ago when we were in Costa Rica but just could’t make it work that time. But this year we planned our vacation around visiting the canal. Seriously how awesome is that?
The booking of the canal trip started when we sat down with a travel agent in our hotel. We got the advice on this hotel group from our airport driver and we were glad that we cancelled our first booking that we did on the internet and choose this group instead.
So we started out the morning getting picked up at our hotel and headed to our boat for the day. The trip was going to take us a good 2 hours to get to our destination and when we got stuck in traffic with people driving literally in all the lanes (both the ones that you should be driving in and the ones that you shouldn’t be driving in!) all of a sudden we got nervous that we wouldn’t make it to the boat in time. Seriously! When we asked our tour guide what would happen if we were late she said haven’t you ever heard of ‘missing the boat’? Yeah, the bus got a little quite at that point because, well because we all probably had heard that saying before! But soon we turned off the main highway and was making good time again in traffic. We found ourselves stopping just as we got to the river and when were getting off to stretch our legs, all of a sudden our tour guide comes back and said for us to hurry and get back on the bus – the boat was waiting. Holy Smokes! So we hurried back to our seats and then on to the boat we go. There was sure a lot of people on the boat when we got there and in the course of the next 30 minutes it was full. It really looked like to me a big boat with a lot of people on it, but that was sure not the case when we were up against the freight carriers in the canal later.
Once we started down the canal we saw a lot of different birds and seagulls along the way and even though they said that there are crocodiles in the river, we never did see any of them. 
But as we made our way down the canal and headed into the first locks . There was a very HUGE ship that we were being paired up and now our boat wasn’t looking just so big anymore. 
Now this is where the awesome part comes in. We were in the Panama Canal going through the locks. We started watching our boat going through the locks in the front of the boat and ended up in the back with the suggestion of Daryl and my brother. What a good idea that was because we could see the gates coming to a close right before our eyes.
There are two sets of gates together just in case one fails and they didn’t want to drain the lake that feeds the water to the canal. But the gates don’t close completely and the force of the water pushes them together to have them sealed.
We ended up going through 2 locks and under a couple of bridges. One was the Bridge of Americas
and the other was the Centennial Bridge Panama.
We did run into a problem though that I have to tell you about. We had a guy that was what I would call a bully on our boat. He was probably around his mid 70’s and started to pick a fight with another person while on the boat. Well they ended up just yelling at each other and that was that. Then this same guy started to pick a fight with someone else and things got bad. They ended up pushing each other and there was concern that the bully was going to push the other guy overboard into the canal. OK, seriously? Well later on in the trip we found out from a tour guide that the pilot of the ship (you have to have a representative on board from the canal with your boat captain) asked our boat captain if this ever happened before and he was told never! The pilot said that he wouldn’t do anything about it unless this guy kept it up. See the pilot had said that this guy who was picking fights had put the security of the Panama Canal in danger. Now what would that mean to this guy if he did call the local federal police? Well it would mean a fine and most likely the bully would have to spend the rest of his life in jail in Panama. Crazy!
I guess you learn something new all the time. And this time it’s to never pick a fight when you’re on the Panama Canal!
After our canal trip and while we were headed back to our hotel, we laughed at this bridge so hard until we thought about just what exactly we were seeing and then we got a little nervous. What we were looking at was the bridge that we were crossing with our tour van would flip the wooden planks up when we would drive over them because they were loose.
Now I don’t know if someone stole the nails or something out of these boards, but even I knew that this was something that you don’t … and probably shouldn’t see every day.
So here are some pictures of the canal that I took. You’re kinda lucky, I’m only sharing a few – I do have a LOT more 🙂
Panama City
And would I recommend this trip to you? Absolutely – I mean it is the 8th Wonder of the World you know. 
It took 250,000 people to build it and we were up close and personal with 5,000,000 ton vessels rise and drop 50 feet in front of us. 
and we even were able to see the new addition to the canal that they were building. 
Yeah, pretty cool.