Ah yes, the highlight of the trip, the Panama Canal transit. Who’s the bright one that scheduled this for New Years Day? According to our Patter, we were supposed to go under the Bridge of the Americas around 5:20am (ugh). Course, supposedly somewhere the night before it had been passed around that we were really going to be about an hour later. Would have been nice to know that, because we could have slept in for a while. As it was, stuck my nose out the window at that time, and between looking around and seeing nothing and looking at the gps realized that we weren’t quite that far yet. Still, we got up shortly after that and headed up to the open area on the front of the ship to watch us head into the canal. Spent most of the time going into the first lock in the Miraflores set up on that front deck.
After that, spent most of the day wandering around the ship trying to get a good look at things from various angles. Course, this did make me once again miss the smaller R class ship we’d been on a couple of cruises ago, because man, when you spend a lot of time running around trying to see things, the Coral suddenly seems bigger. I’d be interested in doing the canal transit in an R class, I think it’d be an interesting comparison.
After passing through the Galliard Cut and reaching Gatun Lake we started running into traffic going the other direction. 
Lots of large cargo ships headed the other direction (although to be honest, a lot of them looked like they might be empty, because they tended to be riding fairly high in the water).
Eventually we reached the Gatun Locks, which we transited next to a large RORO ship. With us they supposedly were doing some sort of relay thing with the mules, where after we got partway through the locks they tied us up and swapped mules around. Supposedly it was supposed to make the process faster, but I’m not really convinced. 
I don’t think the RORO ship next to us was doing it, and it was going through the locks faster, and we sat in the middle lock for quite some time. Maybe the canal crew took their lunch break or something part way through our transit.
Finally after passing into the Caribbean you could see the large collection of ships waiting to transit the other direction. I guess apparently these ships can wait at least 24 to 36 hours to make their transit. Still beats going around South America though. One of the ships waiting to go in was kinda a low, squat ship that looked a bit different. Turns out it was the Delta Mariner. This ship is a transport for pieces for the Delta IV rocket. 
Apparently, it was waiting to go through the canal en route to Kwajalein. Not every day you see a ship carrying rocket parts.
All in all, it was definitely an interesting experience to do this transit. I’d be interested in doing it again someday, preferably on a smaller ship, and definitely preferably not on New Years day. By the end of the day I was exhausted, and really hadn’t done much of anything except wander around the ship.