After our two weeks in Wailea, we started looking for more places to go.
We had already booked a cruise from Barcelona to Cape Town for December, largely because Shirley wanted to be on a cruise over New Year's. That left us with some open time before we were scheduled to return to Maui in November for the Business Success Summit.
So we found a 21-day Norwegian cruise from Seattle to Miami through the Panama Canal.
There wasn't much more strategy to it than that. We had the freedom to travel, there was a trip that looked interesting, and I felt like we should take advantage of the opportunity.
We decided to arrive in Seattle a few days early and stay in Miami for a few days after the cruise.
Seattle
We stayed at the Lotte Hotel, which I remember partly because it was nicer than the hotels I might have chosen in the past. Like the Ulysses in Baltimore, we'd found it through one of the hotel programs associated with our Chase or American Express cards. We were beginning to give ourselves permission to stay in some nicer places.
We didn't arrive in Seattle with much of a plan. We were mostly there early so we wouldn't have to worry about getting to the ship on time.
We rode to the top of the Space Needle and visited Chihuly Garden and Glass. Another day we took the ferry across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island and spent the day walking around.
We walked a lot in Seattle. Shirley found somewhere to get her nails done, and we visited Pikes Place Market, which was extremely crowded.
Nothing about our visit to Seattle particularly captured us, but we enjoyed being there.
Victoria and San Francisco
Our first stop after leaving Seattle was Victoria, British Columbia. We got off the ship and simply wandered around on our own for a while.
San Francisco produced a more lasting memory before we'd even docked.
As we sailed into San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge gradually appeared through the fog. We passed directly underneath it on our way into the harbor.
Everyone on the ship was required to disembark and go through immigration screening. Shirley and I joked that, for some reason, we'd be the ones pulled aside.
When our turn came, the agent reviewed our documents and then suddenly raised his hand to flag someone down.
Here we go.
Except nothing was wrong. He waved us through.
He just needed someone to relieve him so he could go to the bathroom.
We spent the rest of the day exploring San Francisco on our own, using a hop-on hop-off bus and doing a lot of walking.
The next stop was Los Angeles. We stayed on the ship.
The Ports We Didn't Visit
Our next two scheduled stops were in Mexico, but a hurricane caused both to be cancelled.
Costa Rica was also on the itinerary later in the cruise, but that stop was cancelled because repairs at the port meant our ship couldn't dock.
So despite a 21-day itinerary with many scheduled ports, we ended up with considerably more time aboard the ship than originally planned.
Guatemala
Our next stop was Guatemala, where we took a tour to Antigua.
The bus ride was long—about two hours each way as we remember it—and the roads weren't particularly good.
In Antigua, one thing we remember clearly is the souvenir sellers. They were persistent, sometimes aggressively so, and a few weren't especially kind when we declined to buy something.
But we also had a lovely lunch at a local restaurant and enjoyed seeing Antigua.
It was one of those places we were glad to have visited without leaving us with a strong desire to return.
Panama City
We spent two days in Panama City and took guided tours both days.
We saw both sides of the city—the historic neighborhoods and the modern skyline—and learned more about Panama and the canal we were about to transit.
But one of our most enduring memories was much simpler.
On our second day, our tour took us to a local fish market. We had ceviche served in a paper cup with a little plastic spoon and local hot sauce.
Shirley loved it.
It was here that she realized how much she liked ceviche, something that has continued to show up in our travels since.
The Panama Canal
On the morning of our canal transit, I got up early so I could watch the ship approach and enter the canal.
The Panama Canal is an extraordinary feat of engineering, and watching an enormous cruise ship move through the locks gave us a much better appreciation for what was involved in building and operating it.
The actual transit, however, was slow and somewhat anticlimactic.
I'm very glad we experienced it.
I don't need to do it again.
Cartagena
After the canal, we continued to Cartagena, Colombia, where we took another guided tour.
We explored the city and had another very good meal at a local restaurant.
As with Panama City, we enjoyed seeing Cartagena and were glad we'd gone. But neither of us left feeling particularly drawn to return.
Miami
The cruise ended in Miami, where we stayed at the InterContinental for a few days before flying home.
We walked around the city, figured out the Metro and ate some excellent Cuban food.
Miami was interesting and we had fun exploring it. But again, we didn't leave thinking we needed to come back.
What We'll Remember
We'll remember the Golden Gate Bridge emerging from the fog as our ship sailed into San Francisco.
We'll remember laughing when we thought the immigration agent was about to pull us aside, only to discover that he needed a bathroom break.
We'll remember the long bus ride to Antigua, the aggressive souvenir sellers and the lovely lunch that followed.
We'll remember Panama City and the contrast between the old and new parts of the city.
We'll remember eating ceviche from a paper cup at the fish market and Shirley discovering that she loved it.
We'll remember getting up early to enter the Panama Canal, watching the locks work and realizing that the engineering was considerably more exciting than the actual speed of the transit.
And we'll remember that we went.
That may sound like an odd thing to remember, but this was still very early in our retirement. We didn't have a carefully designed travel philosophy or a list of places we were trying to experience.
We had time.
We had freedom.
And when we saw an opportunity to spend three weeks traveling from Seattle to Miami through the Panama Canal, our reaction was essentially: Why not?
Would We Return?
There wasn't a destination on this trip that left us feeling that we needed to return.
That's not a criticism of any of them.
We enjoyed Seattle, San Francisco, Antigua, Panama City, Cartagena and Miami. We ate well, learned a lot and experienced places we'd never seen before.
The Panama Canal itself was something we were glad to experience once.
But none of these places gave us the feeling Wailea had given us a few weeks earlier—the sense that we wanted to stay longer or come back and settle in for a while.
And that was useful to discover too.
