Alistair Baillie.co.uk

Well I went off to visit a friend I met on the Minerva last year down in Wales. After spending a few days at her house we went up to Alton Towers for 2 days.

It’s been ages since I was last at Alton Towers and it has changed a lot. It was brilliant and it wasn’t really that busy on the thursday, which was odd as it was a lovely sunny day and very hot.

By the time we got to the hotel and our park tickets it was around midday. We went straight to the park and worked out way around the rides; we managed to do pretty much every ride on the thursday, although we left Th13teen, Sonic Spinball and Rita until the friday.

As we stayed in the Alton Towers hotel we got into the park an hour before everyone else on the friday morning, so we used this time to go on Sonic Spinball and then went and joined the queue for Th13teen ahead of everyone else.

So over the two days we did every ride except Oblivion – I didn’t fancy that, but Air and Nemesis are brilliant.

Th13teen has a lot of hype built up about it and while it was fun it really wasn’t that scary!

Unfortunately the good weather didn’t last until the Friday, it started pouring around midday so we returned to one of the hotels to have lunch and then drove back to Wales.

I know I am a tad late but Merry Christmas everyone – I hope Santa was good to you all.

Well, I am now back home after a mammoth journey home which had me flying from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires, then onto Frankfurt, then London Heathrow where my journey encountered a small problem due to British Airways canceling all their flights and abandoning me at their brand new Terminal 5 at 1am in the morning! A quick phone call had me on a BMI flight the next morning and I finally reached Edinburgh at 11am on the 22nd (Minus my baggage of course, as British Airways had misplaced that at Terminal 5).

Anyway, that aside Christmas was good, I got a selection of clothes and chocolate as I didn’t really want much and an iTunes gift card which is already being used.

Since the new year is approaching I might change my web site design as this one is getting a bit tiring. I am also going to take part in this “photo 365″ project, which I’ll post some more about tomorrow.

So having liked the previous Ice Age’s I traipsed off to the Showcase in Glasgow to see Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Unfortunately they weren’t running the 3D version of it, but I don’t think it would have made that much of a difference to my opinion of the film.

I won’t give any of the story away – even though most of you will have already seen it – but it was shockingly disappointing, there was the odd funny bit – primarily provided by Scrat – but there’s only so many times you can laugh at a squirrel chasing an acorn before its just not funny any more!

Anyway, moving swiftly on to Harry Potter 6: The Half Blood Prince. Anyone who knows me will know that I love the Harry Potter books and generally like the films. This latest film though is terrible – I accept that the books are now to big to fit into one film, but this latest one missed out several of what I would class as important parts of the book!

So here’s hoping the next film on the last book is much better!

Since my last entry a few weeks ago I have updated the web site with a new design and switched my blog to using a program I designed for another web site. If you have been visiting over the past few weeks you may have noticed lots of one line entries – these were imports taken automatically from Twitter, I have decided however that this was a bad idea as a lot of the messages were pretty random and not really of interest to people outside twitter, I have since removed the automatic Twitter importing, so if you want to see what I am up to regularly you can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/alistairuk.

Speaking of Twitter I was playing around with Photoshop this morning and changed the way my profile looks, inspired by Justine who did a similar thing a few months ago.

In other news videos I place on YouTube automatically import too, so there are now two videos of me at Maho Beach on the joint Dutch/French island of St Marten in the Caribbean.

On the merchant navy front I am returning to Warsash Maritime Academy (who have a new web site by the way) on sunday for what is hopefully my last time there.

I believe I have 3 weeks of revision/finishing off the foundation degree and then around 9 weeks of short courses such as GMDSS, Advanced Fire Fighting, Emergency First Aid, NARAS and EDH. Before being able to sit my orals examination with the MCA.

Anyway, this was meant to just be a quick update, I shall start writing more when I return to Warsash.

Ive been at home for just over a month now and just got my flight details this morning. I will be flying out to join the Island Star in Palma de Mallorca (Balearic Islands) on Saturday morning, where the plan is to sail around for a week, then head to Marseille (South coast of France) to pick up passengers before heading out of the Mediterranean and across the North Atlantic to the Caribbean, where we will sail out of Barbados every two weeks.

This is (hopefully) my final trip as a cadet before I go up for my orals examination some time around June 2009 and I still have quite a bit to learn – although I am getting there.

This was also to be Island Cruises first time in the Caribbean and unfortunately its also their last, with the Island Star returning to one of the other Royal Caribbean brands at the end of March (see the press release on Island Cruises web site if you are interested), I am assuming this will be when the cadets leave and fly home – but you never know!

This time I shall try and record some interesting videos of the workings of the ship (or at least photos), including a tour of the engine room and other random events that passengers don’t get to see.

I was hoping to be experiencing a dry dock during my first week onboard, but that appears to have been cancelled, but we shall see what happens.

Also for the past 4 weeks there has been a weekly 30 minute documentary on STV (presumably to be repeated on the ITV network at some point this/next year) called The Merchant Navy which follows some cadets from Mearsk, BP & Carnival through their training. If you don’t live in Scotland you can watch it on the STV Catchup web site here.