The Panama Canal, wow. We have been in and out of the marina beside it for several years now watching excited boaters get ready to cross through.
Everyone has heard stories of the difficulties of building it. The French failed at their attempt to dig a ditch without locks between the Pacific and the Caribbean. A lot of lives were lost to mud slides in the wet season and disease moving most of the earth from some of the biggest mountain passes. The project was taken on by the Americans who realized a Suez type canal wouldn’t work with tide differences of up to eighteen feet between the two oceans.
The Americans with political and military strength restructured Central America by helping separate the area from Columbia and aided in the creation of the country of Panama before they started.
A lot more lives of people from around the Caribbean and China were lost but the canal was finally finished in 1914. The museum at Mira Flores Locks on the Pacific side shows a very impressive engineering feat for the equipment they had to work with 100 years ago.
The legend of the canal is more impressive to us than what we see of the canal now. Watching on TV large excavations carried on for roads, mining, and cities in Saudi Arabia, takes from the enormity of the construction efforts, but they are always in your thoughts as you cross a continent from one ocean to another. We were very excited about getting across to the Pacific Ocean and on to the next part of our ongoing adventure.