Saturday, September 6, 2014

Day 9

Day at sea. The Lady Regatta is continuing down the coast of central America and we will arrive in Puntarenas, Costa Rica tomorrow morning. Puntarenas means "sandy point" and it is Costa Rica's port, where the oxcarts filled with coffee came down from the highlands to ship their coffee off to Starbucks or whomever. Apparently, garishly painted oxcarts are for sale in all the shops.

I've been doing basically nothing, an hour on the gym's treadmill, reading The Miniaturist and the New York Times on my ipad. Larry is trying to sort out our 19,000 photographs using the latest Adobe software. (He thinks we have a lot of duplicates.)

I've discovered that if I breakfast in the Terraces (the cafeteria) I can ask for exactly what I want to eat, and no more. By this time in the cruise, I'm starting to feel a little anxious about how much food I'm wasting. It might be a little depressing if I think about it too much.

I went to a lecture on Costa Rica this morning and learned that Costa Rica is relatively rich and prosperous, with a stable democracy and excellent social services. Furthermore, Costa Rica is considered to be one of the "greenest" places on earth, reducing carbon emissions, outlawing all recreational hunting, preserving their rain forests.

We're all getting excited about the Panama Canal transit, which is coming up soon. I watched a documentary on the canal this afternoon, which basically recapitulated everything I'd read in the David McCullough book, but with an added overlay of patriotism. Only America could have accomplished such a feat! Well, maybe. The photographs were fascinating, though.

We had a table for six tonight at another one of the "specialty" restaurants, and it was excellent. I'm still focusing on fish. I've taken to grabbing my napkin and putting it in my lap before the waiter can do this difficult task for me! They're always shoving my chair into the table (with me in it) and I'm trying to resist.

Excursion tomorrow (all day) to a Costa Rica volcano. Stay tuned for that post tomorrow evening.

1 comment:

  1. You napkin nabber, you….I hear Costa Rica has quite an ex-pat community.

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