Thursday-Friday, January 4-5, Los Angeles, CA

We left Cabo San Lucas early New Years evening.  We sailed two sea days on our way to Los Angeles, California, arriving about 6 AM January 4.  

We did not go on our scheduled shore excursion yesterday because we needed to take care of some personal chores. We packed too many warm and dress-up clothes so we needed to send some home from here.  We found a UPS store and sent an entire suitcase full back to our apartment.  We had developed a list of items over the first three weeks that we wanted to shop for before leaving the US and prior to returning on May 5.  Therefore we took no tours or pictures to share.

Below is a series of Panama Canal pictures taken by the Viking Sun photographer using a drone!  He must also be quite the pilot.  I took these photos of the pictures as they were shown on a screen a few days ago.  Please excuse some black borders but they seemed worthy of including them in a blog post. 

Something really great about Viking is their guest lecturer program.  We had the following lecturers from Miami to LA:  PhD whose expertise is in the Caribbean/Central America – further identified as the resident historian, PhD whose expertise is in architecture, PhD whose expertise is in physics (he stole the show with canals, catapults, cars of the past and future), PhD who worked as a US representative to the UN on international relations, and a conservationist who studies ocean life, especially whales and dolphins (he will remain with us until New Zealand).  There were a least two lectures daily.

Today we boarded a new batch of lecturers; we will need them for the numerous sea days ahead.  In fact we started the first of seven sea days tomorrow.  Included are:  PhD resident historian, resident writer, PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins University – Middle East and Russian foreign policy, our wildlife and whale watching boat skipper, British intelligence analyst and World Intelligence Review’s editor, PhD of anthropology (Pacific), specialist in Polynesian botany, and PhD geologist specializing in caves and geohazards.  Should be very interesting for the areas we are heading in the next 3-4 weeks.

Not sure what we will post the next week since we will not see land.  But will keep you posted of anything we can.