FRIDAY'S FOTO

Traveling through that engineering wonder, the Panama Canal.
Looking closely, you can see how little space is left on either side of a ship moving goods
and/or people from one ocean side to another.
Cruise ships like our Coral Princess must be smaller to go through.
We went on a repositioning cruise as the Coral Princess moved from its winter Caribbean itinerary to its summer Alaskan itinerary.  Most cruises do not go all the way through from one ocean to the other.
The three steps of the Gatun Locks, via gravity, each lower ships 28 feet to the level of the Atlantic Ocean.  You can see that how much lower the cargo ship is in front of us.
A great book about the Panama Canal is David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal