Just the stats, ma’am…

The luggage barge collecting bags, pre-dawn, this morning...if each passenger had

3 bags, that’s 2,490 bags to sort, onload, offload and sort again (photo by my new Viking friend Susan Thomas)

Somewhere above England/the Atlantic, May 5 — I was determined to send my last real “travelogue” post while I was still abroad, and I met that deadline when I sent ‘Greenwich’ from Heathrow.

Now, some fun facts about my 5-month home away from home, the Viking Sun. Like all the facts I’ve deluged you with the past 144 days, I think they’re fun — you may or may not agree.

• We traveled 36,585 nautical miles = 42,101 land miles

• With a daily average of 2.11 miles (according to my phone), I walked about 305 miles total — the distance from Boston to Québec City! There were a few days I topped 5 miles

• The Sun has a crew of 458 in all departments, serving 837 passengers

• The Deck Team has 35 members — Deck (‘swabbing,’ etc.), Carpenters and Security keeping her ‘ship shape and Bristol fashion’ (I will talk about nautical expressions in a future post)

• The Engine Room has 39 members looking after 4 engines: 2 ‘fathers’ and 2 ‘sons,’ generating 6,720kw and 5,040kw each, respectively

• Speed at 100% Normal Continuous Rate: 18 knots

• Speed at 100% Maximum Continuous Rate: 20 knots (e.g., if outrunning pirates)

• Potable water consumed during this cruise: 38,675 cubic meters (no, I do not know how many gallons that computes to)

• ‘Have you ever wondered, where does all the waste go?’ our handout inquired. The 5-member Incinerator and Garbage Separation Team takes care of it! The Sun must comply with varying environmental regulations in each of the ports of calls — especially stringent: French Polynesia, Australia and New Zealand — and incurred no infractions or fines on the trip

*450 cubic meters of compacted plastic waste (bottles are crushed and off-loaded in countries that have recycling facilities)

* 80,000 wine and liquor bottles crushed (EMPTY!) and the shards off-loaded

* 800 cubic meters of dry domestic waste was incinerated (one quarter of this was incinerated onboard — the soot on the aft deck chair cushions is proof!)

* Millions of fish were ‘fed from ground food waste disposed of per very stringent maritime regulations.’ I’m surprised we weren’t followed around the world by thousands of seagulls. We were followed for a couple of days by an albatross, though I never saw it

*I have no information about sewage, and I don’t want to know

• The 5-member Pursers Team handles Immigration and Customs and we owe them a lot! (Not that we don’t owe the other teams as well.) They processed:

* 837 guest passports from 10 different nations

* 458 crew passports from 38 different nations

* 34 Countries visited between Miami and London

* Uncountable number of arrival and departure cards

And then there was India! Chennai was the worst port in terms of immigration. The officials were corrupt — I’m sure they would have accepted rupees, but when that was not forthcoming, they insisted their families be allowed to come onboard en masse and would not clear us to land if they couldn’t. Viking has a strict No Children rule but they barged on and, as I related at the time, ate all the Easter candy decorations. #