Aboard the NYK Romulus

Today I opened my inbox and found a delightful message: Our sea shipment is aboard the NYK Romulus and will be arriving in the port of Southhampton on the 12th of August!

The NYK Romulus is a Singaporean container ship. She was built in 2010 and she’s been around the world a few times. It’s unknown how many containers she can carry so we’ll just say that she can carry a shit ton.

I get nervous when I think about our container of goods stacked on a ship that’s swaying in the big waves and plastic in the ocean. How are the containers secured to other containers and to the ship itself? The mind boggles.

When we moved from Dallas to London, the route of our household goods (“sea” shipment”) was fairly straightforward. From Dallas, they were loaded onto a train bound for Georgia. In Georgia, they were loaded onto a container ship where they set sail for the UK.

When we moved from London to Seattle, the estimated transit time for our sea shipment was several weeks longer than it was from Dallas to London. This made sense because Seattle is tucked up in the northwest corner of the country and is VERY FAR AWAY from everything in the US but several additional weeks seemed like an extra-long extension of time.

Then I realized that is was possible that our goods were not alighting in Georgia and would instead continue on their journey through the Panama Canal and then turn north and sail along the west coast of the US to the port of Seattle.

I never got an answer to that question, by the way. It seems like yesterday when our goods arrived in Seattle. Dexter was still alive, he was still “needy”, and the weather in Seattle had turned wet.

The photo below was taken two weeks after we moved to Seattle. I miss Dexter but I do not miss the hourly battle against German Shorthaired Pointer fur!

With our most recent move from Seattle to London, we were given an estimate of 9-11 weeks for our sea shipment. Today marks the end of six weeks since our goods were packed. Glorious!

With the short duration of our current shipment, I wondered if the ship went through the Panama Canal. I turned to Google and Google provided minimal information like the ship’s recent port calls.

At first glance, I thought our container was loaded in Savannah, Georgia but a quick scan of the list leads to the possibility that because it could have been loaded in California. Have our dishes and crockery been to Colombia before we have? Possibly.

I like to track things so dug a little more on the world wide web hoping to find a map with a pinned location of the ship but, unfortunately, the ship’s last known public position was on the 2nd of August just off the coast of Georgia.

To satisfy my curiosity, I’ve guestimated its current position in the Atlantic.

When the container arrives in the port of Southhampton, it will go through customs which will take 4-7 business days. Our container includes non-essential household goods, therefore, it gets put to the back of the queue. Containers containing food, medications, and other priority items take shipping and customs priority.

The lease on our flat begins on the 2nd of September. Tomorrow we will stop by the estate agent’s office to have them verify our identities in person. This is a requirement of a new law that went into effect in the UK on 1 February 2016.

The law is called Right to Rent and it requires landlords/ladies to routinely check tenant to documents to ensure their tenants have a right to live and rent in the UK for the duration of the lease term. In other words, the government has placed “light” immigration duties on the shoulders of everyday people. The initial identity check can only occur within 28 days of the lease start date which is why we have not yet completed this step even though our lease has been finalized. This law is incredibly stupid.

Our household goods will recover from “sealag” in a warehouse somewhere in England and will be delivered to our flat on the 3rd of September. It is a relief that we will not have to rent furniture in our flat and I am excited that we are in the final countdown of life’s latest chapter.