The day started early – 5:30 am. That was when the ship approached the locks of the canal. When Anne got on the deck, it was still dark. As the sun rose, we passed through the canal. It was neat to see and amazing that this thing was ever built. It also gave me a …
1. The canal is not just a “path” of water bewteen the two oceans. There are a series of 6 locks in two parallel tracks that raise and lower ships between the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. 2. The locks had to be built because of the terrain. The highest point is 85 feet above …
Another lazy day at sea. After all of yesterday’s fun I was beat so I lounged around in my room for a while. I flipped on the TV to one of those channels where they play the same movie over and over again in a loop. “The Island” appeared to be just starting. The movie …
I was last in Aruba about 13 years ago. I remembered only a pool, a beach, a casino and a windmill. Today we set off to rent a car and tour the island, and we did. After waiting for an Avis guy to pick us up, the 6 of us got into Suzuki XL-7 and …
I woke up late – it was almost 9. Counterintuitively, Aruba is +1 hour from the east coast (the dateline takes a sharp cut west to accomodate Venezuela), so we lost an hour. I did the morning walk, then headed to breakfast. We stationed ourselves in a group of lounge chairs facing the sea in …
Continue reading ‘Vacation Blog Day 4: Can I get more relaxed?’ »
8 am was painful. I spent a good part of the day fighting off sleep. Jet lag sucks. It was rather windy out today. On deck the relative windspeed was over 45 mph. That made a nice walk an interesting exercise. They have this “Ship Shape” program where you earn a “Ship Shape Dollar” for …
Continue reading ‘Vacation Blog Day 3: A walk off the coast of Cuba’ »
Not that I’m complaining. Day 2 started out late, east coast time at least. Anne had already been up for a while, but I couldn’t get up any earlier than 9. If we had thought things through a bit more, we might have realized that we had a least a half-day to explore Miami. Without …
Continue reading ‘Vacation Blog Day 2: Blistered, Burned and Disconnected’ »
A year or so ago, my parents booked us all on a 10-day cruise around the Caribbean. I’ve been looking forward to it and it’s finally here. Kinda. I’m not sure that a frantic 24 hours of packing up, tying up loose ends and flying to Miami counts as ‘vacation’ – especially since I went …
Continue reading ‘Vacation Blog Day 1: Get me out of here!’ »
Yesterday I got a strange piece of mail. It was a thin security enevelope with nothing printed on either side. Through a window on the front was simply my address printed on a piece of paper. The stamp was one of those “Presorted First Class” stamps that aren’t really stamps. There was no return address. …
Something that’s mystified me of late is the popularity of tag clouds. Why do people like them? Don’t they realize they’re ugly? Or perhaps no one really likes them, everyone just thinks someone else likes them. Let’s take an example tag cloud, a strange mishmash of oddly-sized words that look like a 12-year old just …