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Panama  is a country that exists because of the Canal. First the French tried back in the 1880s and failed after many years. Then the US took over in 1904 and completed the construction finally in 1914. For the next nine decades, the US basically controlled the territory of the Canal Zone until the sovereignty was given back to Panama on 12/31/1999. In 2007 construction work started to build a wider set of locks to accommodate bigger & wider container ships. Currently it takes approximately 10 hours to transit the canal at average cost of $150,000 per passage of cargo vessel. The saving is the extra 22 days a ship takes to go over one ocean to another via the South America route.

Since we stopped skiing some seven years ago, winter in Boston can become long  and boring. As a result, we try to find a southern vacation during mid winter. This year a group of us choose the six day Panama trip. For most of us, the Panama Canal is often thought of as a simple sea level channel between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. Nothing can be further from the truth. It is basically a climb by a ocean ship over the mountain ridge of Central America using only the natural power of water and gravity without pumps and electricity. Given the time of construction and technology of a century ago, this is an engineering accomplishment of supreme order.

We 'll post photos and other details upon our return on 3/4 . (We have now done so. See the next article)