Finish of Day 2!

Welcome to my first blog! I am passenger number 685 out of 724 students that are around 350 miles into our 3,700 mile Atlantic crossing to Cadiz, Spain. Spain will be our first stop of thirteen taking us to a total of ten countries. You can follow the ships progress around the world and find much more information at sesemsteratsea.org > current voyage.

Twenty hours after arriving in Nassau, I stepped out of the taxi at the port. Apparently, there are a lot more S and T last names than A-C since the “20 minute check-in” took 3.5 hours! Nonetheless, my new found line buddy, Amber from Edmond, OK and I still had enough time to disembark the ship and make a stop at the local grocery store for some snacks and hangers. Later and after of conclusion of our lifeboat drill, just a few minutes after 1700, we were officially on our way!

I am only going into my second night on the ship, but already it feels as if we have been here a week. We had orientation from 1900 to 2300 last night and again from 700 to 2100 today. We just finished with an inauguration party and I have never seen so many fancy deserts made at one time!

I am very lucky to not have experienced any seasickness so far without the help of Dramamine. Many of my shipmates are not so luck as the hard headwind is making for a lot of rocking and rolling (no pun intended :) ). At dinner tonight we, literally had to hold onto the table settings to keep from having everything spill on the floor! It is quite entertaining to walk down the narrow hallways bouncing from one side of the hall to the next!

I have a great window cabin midship. The ship’s pitching is really evened out in the middle and very good for sleeping. I how know why we rock babies to sleep. We were even told during orientation that a moderately rocking day makes very difficult to stay awake in class, but that we will get used to sooner or later.

My roommate Jackie from Long Island, NY has been very easy to get along with. She was not one of the 6 semester at sea participants that were on the Hudson plane crash. Those six students were coming down to spend the week in Nassau and despite loosing all of their clothing, text books, laptops, etcetera all were able to join us yesterday for an on time departure.

We will be starting classes tomorrow morning and have seven class days before we arrive in Cadiz. We are traveling at 21 knots average on a course of 79 degrees. The ship has a maximum speed of 28 knots, but head wind and rough sea require a lower speed for the engines to run efficiently.

Hope to hear from you all soon!
Kate
kjshoemaker@semesteratsea.net