Panama Canal cruise - WOW

I am not a frequent cruiser but wanted to mark my 65th birthday with a special event. We had a mini suite, D617, it had plenty of room, very comfortable bed, very clean, and nice balcony. We had the door between our balcony and our friends next door open so we could go back and forth and have coffee/wine on the balcony. The service was excellent in all areas except for dinner time.  Our room steward was fabulous. We ran into a couple of waiters at dinner (we chose anytime dining, so had different wait staff every night) who were surly and/or downright rude.  The food at dinner was very good and had a nice range of choices each night.  If we went to dinner by 6pm, there was usually no wait, if we were a bit later, the longest wait was around 30 minutes.  Some nights we sat with others, some nights we requested a table for 4, kinda fun to mix it up. The Horizon buffet was exceptionally clean, with a wide variety of offerings and some things were changed each day so you didn't have to eat the same thing. Room service was prompt (except when you forget to give them your room number!) The customer service staff were very helpful, gave great input on what to do on shore, what to pay taxi drivers in the ports where we didn't do ship excursions, and what to expect/prepare for.  When I found a charge on my ship account that wasn't mine they speedily arranged for it to be taken off my bill. (It seems people will give the bartender some cabin number other than theirs, and then sign the bill illegibly so that the staff was unable to figure out who it was, but since they could clearly see that nothing about the signature matched my name, off came the $75 bar tab.  Loved that the ship wasn't over crowded, could always find a comfortable lounge chair, or a table and chair in a cozy spot to sit and read and relax. I was concerned about norovirus as it has become a big problem on cruise ships. Our rooms were cleaned twice a day and they used bleach/water (the only thing that kills norovirus) twice a day in our rooms and I saw cleaning staff in the public bathrooms with their bleach solution all the time. I was very impressed with the cleanliness everywhere. Except for the Panama Canal I felt that the ports were just OK, too short a time in Aruba to do much, HOT, HOT, HOT in Cartagena, Costa Rica rainforest okay, Grand Cayman lovely.  But the highlight of the trip and the reason we came was the Panama Canal and we were not disappointed.  There was a guest speaker on board who gave a couple of very interesting talks about the canal in the days before our arrival there and then he narrated our passage in the canal/locks.  Sadly, you could not hear his narration from the balcony and we were unable to get it on TV as they said we could.  The cruise ship only goes through the first set of 3 locks from the Caribbean to Gatun Lake.  We then took an excursion that put us on a ferry boat and we went the rest of the way through the canal to the Pacific with views of the Panama City skyline.  That was FABULOUS!  You really see the locks up close (in fact you can touch the sides), you see everything up close and personally, there was narration on this transit too so we learned even more.  There is nothing like sharing a lock with two large sailboats tied up to the side of the ferry and a huge car carrier coming in behind the ferry to fill up the rest of the lock!  It was a long day, probably left the cruise ship at 9:30, returned at 8pm, but all 4 of us loved the canal transit and agreed it was worth the long day. Overall I was very pleased with our cruise on the Coral Princess and would recommend it to anyone.  My friend who has taken many cruises raved about how uncrowded everything was.  The Coral Princess is smaller than most cruise ships as it was built to be able to fit in the Panama Canal, so you don't have as many fancy water slides and climbing walls and such, but you also don't have to fight crowds.