Sorry it’s taken me so long to get this blog going. I’m now into the fourth week of my six month cruise and am having a great time onboard Holland America Line’s msRyndam.
So far I’ve visited countries such as the Bahamas, Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Mexico, Belize and Honduras. I’ll be covering each of these destinations in future blogs, complete with photos. In the meantime, here’s a picture I took at Grand Turk, during the first week of our cruise.
Working on the ship is pretty fun. I’m the band leader of a trio, called the ‘Neptunes’ (the same trio appears on all Holland America Line – HAL – ships). My other band mates are a drummer called Marino from Italy and a bass player called Thomas from Texas. We play from 6.30pm to 11.30pm every night (yes, EVERY night) in the Ocean Bar, an open-plan area on the eighth deck of the ship complete with dance floor.
Our mandate is to play ‘dance music’ so we do a lot of ballroom / strict tempo pieces. HAL provide music books for us to play from (about 400 tunes spread over four volumes) which are pretty comprehensive. We’ve also brought our own Real Books which we dip into when nobody's looking!
In the coming weeks, as well as covering destinations, I’ll also show you around the ship, including some video of the Neptunes performing and a look at my cabin! I’ll hopefully be updating this blog more frequently now so be sure to check back soon.
Thanks for reading!
Peter
