Well I have finally finished my contract on the Volendam. What started as an 8 month contract ended as a 9 1/2 month contract. I enjoyed almost all of it and really got to see a lot of great things. Asia, Alaska, South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand ain’t bad for one contract, and now I’m in London. There are new photos in my photo gallery of New Zealand.

For my vacation I’m chilling out at Niamh’s house. We took a 9 hour flight from Sydney to Hong Kong and then a 13 hour flight from Hong Kong to London. I think that’s farther than I’ve ever flown, including going from China to the States. Needless to say I’m battling jet lag just a bit.

Our initial plans for the 6 week vacation that we have is just to sleep and eat and try to recuperate from an insane contract, but we do have some more interesting plans as well. We’re going to visit Ireland because Niamh is half Irish and has family there. We’re going to visit Scotland because it sounds awesome and Niamh hasn’t even been there. If we have time and money we may take the train to Paris. Also some highlights in the UK are Big Ben, (which Niamh loves making fun of me for wanting to see) Stonehenge, the hop-on hop-off bus in London, and any other various things we want to do. Yesterday I had the pleasure of going on the Underground.

I just bought myself a new camera, the Nikon D700. I had my previous camera stolen on the Volendam and happily Holland America reimbursed me for it, so I get to upgrade now. The shipping in the UK is insanely fast because I just bought the camera yesterday and the guy sent me an email with the tracking information saying it is supposed to be delivered today before 1pm. I guess I’m going to have to start enjoying it very soon! 😀

My next ship is going to be the Ryndam. It’s kinda crazy how over 3 contracts I will have only been on 2 ships. Most people do 2 ships in their first contract. Well I wouldn’t say most but a large majority of people get transferred at least a couple times and I have yet to have that happen in the middle of a contract. I will join the Ryndam in Tampa and do 2 or 3 cruises down there before the ship relocates to Europe where I will spend the rest of the contract. It’s going to be doing a lot of cruises in Norway, going up extremely north. I guess it’s gonna be even colder than Alaska there. We’re also going to go to England, The Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, France, Italy and quite a few other places. As you might tell I’m VERY excited about this next contract. I hear it’s a struggle as far as making money goes, but I’m not really in it for the money this time around, I wanna see Europe!