Panama Canal Cruise - Curaςao


High winds and rough seas hit us shortly after exiting the Panama Canal.  This resulted in not only many a queasy stomach, including our own, but also forced the ship to slow down to the point that we had to skip our scheduled stop in Aruba.  An extra sea day wasn’t the end of the world since we’ve found the entertainment on board surprisingly good. There have been a couple of different comedians who were actually funny, some vocal groups that were pretty good, and a quintet of talented young classical musicians associated with the Lincoln Center.  Even former Olympic gymnast Lance Ringnald had an unexpectedly entertaining show where he acrobatically swung around on aerial silks while cracking the occasional joke. In a different show he gave a talk about another facet of his post-Olympic career – that of memory improvement. Lately feeling somewhat lacking in this department, we not only attended his talk but also bought his memory improvement program that was downloaded onto a flash drive that cleverly flips out from a sturdy plastic business card.

Apart from that we’ve mostly resisted the constant onboard peddling of jewelry, clothing, cocktails, specialty dining, etc.  An exception was a couple of spa treatments that Deborah couldn’t resist, especially after winning a raffle prize for $75 off any service (which really only reduced the cost to something more normal that you’d pay if you weren’t on a cruise ship).  At one point I checked the statement of our onboard spending (everything gets charged to our cabin) and found a gift shop charge of $50 that I couldn’t account for. So we went to Guest Services to find out if an error had been made. Turns out the charge was for the memory program we purchased!  Thus did we prove that we desperately need it.

After skipping our Aruba stop we made it on time to neighboring Curaςao, another Dutch island in the Lesser Antilles of the southern Caribbean Sea. We docked in the capital city Willemstad, which proved to be a photographic delight with all its many colorful Dutch colonial buildings.  After Curaςao we finished off our cruise in Fort Lauderdale, 16 days after embarking in San Diego.
















































































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