Travelling to the Ship

We left Toronto Saturday November 27th to fly to Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It was a really neat airport. The first five photos were taken at the airport in Amsterdam. The flight was not too bad, about 7 hours. We left at 6pm east coast time and then we flew into the central european time zone (6 hrs ahead) and it was morning time there about 7am. Then we took a bus to the first hotel, still in Amsterdam. We checked in with the Disney people there and ate breakfast until we got onto another bus that took us 2 hrs to the middle of nowhere in The Netherlands, to a town called Zuidbroek, Gronigen. We had to stay there a few days because the ship was doing sea trials. Sea trials are tests the limits and capabilities of the ship at sea, so the ship did not dock until Tuesday night. So we stayed at that hotel until Tuesday morning.

On Monday we took a cab into the happening city in Gronigen and spent almost the whole day there. I'm not too sure what it was called, we all just called it Gronigen. The next post will have a description and pictures from that little outing.

On Tuesday all the new hires had to go through what we call "wet drills". It's a safety course on water survival. As you can see in the sixth photo, we had to wear red dry suits. That is my friend Morgan pushing all the air out of her dry suit. Obviously the idea is that the suits keep you dry. They were all extra large and it was obviously not tight enough for me, so I was unable to stay dry. The last photo was taken at the marine school where the wet drills were held. The indoor pool was freezing! But, I guess we were lucky to have it there instead of the waters the ship is sitting on now. We had to practice certain survival positions in the water in groups. Then we had to practice getting into a life raft, helping others into the life raft, and also practice flipping the life raft right side up if it were to flip over. It was really fun, besides being cold, but we were able to meet a lot of new people in other departments on the ship.

After our wet drills we took a 3 hr bus ride to finally get to the ship in Bremerhaven, Germany.