Kate Flora: Apologies for being so tardy today. We just got home at midnight after two long flights and I was too groggy earlier to put words together. My husband and I, recognizing that we aren’t getting any younger, decreed the 2026 would be “the year of travel.” The last seven days have marked the beginning of that with a Lindblad National Geographic trip to Costa Rica and Panama. Seven days on a small ship. Seven days when I don’t have to buy groceries or cook or do laundry. Seven days of rising and shining and putting on my water shoes and climbing into bouncing black zodiacs to explore coastal national parks.

I don’t know about you, but no matter how carefully I read the pre-trip materials, I’m always surprised by what really happens. I am sure I didn’t sign up for so much bird watching and I am grateful that there wasn’t a quiz on the botany. Still, it was a great adventure. Who expected plate tectonics? What could be more fun that seeing how pineapples grow, seeing coffee beans on a plant, and learning that there are square bananas? I didn’t know that a banana plant isn’t a tree but a plant that dies once it has produced bananas. We were lucky to have great naturalists along to explain what we were seeing.

Since my husband and I love snokeling, that was a highlight. Half the day on the beach, where I tried paddle boarding, and half the day swimming around a reef seeing dozens of different colorful fish.

Then, as the grand finale, we went through the Panama Canal. First, we watched a movie about the building of the canal, full of historical photos taken at the time. Then we parked near the entrance to the canal surrounded by enormous tankers and container ships. Those ships piled with containers look so precarious I don’t see why they don’t tip over. Someone said that a huge number of containers are lost every year and I’m not surprised.

At ten at night, sharing a lock with another ship, we slowly edged into the canal. Brilliantly lit. On both sides, funny little metal engines on tracks attached to the ship with cables that followed the ship to keep it steady in the canal. I must have been insufficiently curious before this trip because I didn’t know that there are canals and locks to raise the ships up and lower them down at either end but in the middle is a huge man-made lake filled with small islands that once were the tops of hills.

Those little islands are alive with an amazing diversity of wildlife and we spent a day cruising around the lake and hiking in a rainforest filled with beautiful birds. (I never would have seen them, which is why the guide with a scope is so important.)

A row of bats on a tree