Simply having a wonderful Christmas time

Christmas has come and gone, and it has been a great week so far in Edinburgh.

We left the Logos Hope in Denmark on 19th December to begin the drive back home. We travelled through Denmark and into Germany and stayed the night in Bremen at the house where one of our friends had lived for 6 months before joining the Logos Hope. It was amazing that this German couple who we had never met were so friendly and helpful. We enjoyed a good night with them and on Friday morning were back on the road heading for Amsterdam and the ferry.

We thought we had given ourselves plenty of time to get to the 5.30pm ferry. After all the SatNav told us it was 3 1/2 hours driving and we had about 5 1/2 hours. But then we were led a merry trip around Bremen for an hour before we managed to get out and onto the motorway.

With about an 90 mins driving left to the port, we stopped for lunch at McDonalds thinking we had plenty of time. But just 20 mins after getting back on the road, we hit a traffic jam and ground to a complete halt. In the next 40 mins we travelled 6km. The clock was ticking and we started to get nervous about getting to the ferry on time. When we finally started moving again we only had 50 mins left until the ferry was due to leave, and nearly 30 mins driving.

Then we hit another traffic jam. It was getting very tight but thankfully when we pulled up to the port after 5pm, there was still a queue of cars waiting to get on. The ferry was late loading and finally set sail half an hour late.

The captain told us that the weather forecast was for a rough voyage and a delayed arrival next morning. We went to bed in our little cabin expecting a rough night but actually it wasn't too bad at all and we were very surprised to find that we were sailing into Newcastle next morning more or less on time.

It was last on first off and within 10 mins of arriving in port, we were heading out of the docks. It was a beautiful sunny day and we had one of those magic moments as we drove over the Scottish border with the sun glinting off the sea and Joy to the World blasting out of the speakers. It was a great feeling. Before long we were at Heather's mums enjoying a cup of tea and mince pies.

We had lots of great reunions over the next days with Heather's parents and mine - who arrived on Monday in time of Kara's birthday, and many other good friends.

On Sunday we enjoyed being back in our church and in the evening we joined in carol singing on the street outside the church doors.

22nd December is Kara's birthday and we had a great day. We took her to a great play zone with a couple of her friends for a few hours and then in the evening we went out for dinner at a great Mexican restaurant.

Christmas Eve, after we said goodbye to my parents, we followed our annual Christmas tradition, well one going back 4 years anyway, and met up with our friends Colin and Allison to watch "Polar Express" one of our favourite Christmas films. Christmas Eve is such a great day because it is filled with anticipation and excitement but without many of the pressures of Christmas Day. We love it.

We hope that you all had a fantastic Christmas. We certainly enjoyed ours - opening presents, going to church, visiting Heather's 99 year old granny, me cooking Christmas dinner, playing with the kids toys, enjoying Christmas tv and having a really great day.

So we are now half way through our time at home. We are looking forward to another week of meeting up with friends and family and having a good relaxing time. More updates this week.

Merry Christmas

Happy Christmas to all the readers of our blog.
we are having a great time in Edinburgh with friends and family. We hope that you all are enjoying this wonderful season.
We will do a full update in the next couple of days of all our travels over the past week.
Until then, have a great holiday season.

We're driving home for Christmas

It's Monday night - 3 days to go and we will be taking our longest ever drive home for Christmas. I mean we've driven home to the family before back in the UK, but that is only 4 hours or so.
On Thursday, after school finishes we will get in our car (which we have had with us since leaving home last summer) and drive from Koge to the ferry at the south of the Island across to Germany, then carry on driving a few hours to Bremen. We plan to spend the night there and then on Friday drive on to Amsterdam in the Netherlands to get the overnight ferry to Newcastle in England. Then it's a couple of hours up the road to Edinburgh. It'll be bacon butties and a cup of tea followed by a mince pie for lunch. Great!
We have just enjoyed the 3rd of our open weekends with another 750 people coming onboard.
It was great to have some of our Danish friends visiting over the weekend and be able to share the Christmas experience with them. One remarked that we were serving the best and cheapest cup of hot chocolate she had enjoyed all year.
Due to the great success of the past 3 weekends, it was decided to open again the coming weekend on a slightly smaller scale. Of course we won't be here.

Tomorrow we have another meeting to review progress on obtaining the PSSC and the work required next year. So far we are still on track for the survey at the end of January.

Our next blog will be written from Edinburgh. Meanwhile, don't forget that if you haven't finished your Christmas shopping, you can get great gifts from Amazon, including gift vouchers and if you click on the link to the right, you will be helping our support here on Logos Hope.

week 2 of Christmas around the world

On Friday night, the Logos Hope hosted a concert by the man named "The King of Gospel Music" - Jesse Dixon. It is very unusual for the ship to hold a concert on behalf of a third party but this event was especially different as the first thing we knew about the concert was when we received some flyers advertising it in the post! The ship had been asked if we would host the event and we had said no, but the organiser went ahead anyway. They also told everyone that there is lots to do on Logos Hope so people can come early. So from 4pm onwards we had visitors arriving who happily enjoyed our book shop and cafe while they waited.

The concert also featured a 38 voice gospel choir which was another first for our new Logos Lounge. Despite a host of challenges for the events team as well as the AV team, all of the 300 concert goers seemed to enjoy Jesse's gospel concert.
















On Saturday and Sunday, we once again opened the doors for our second Christmas around the World weekend. Although we had less visitors than the first weekend, those that came bought more books, spent more time onboard and engaged more with the ships company. The cafe was positively buzzing on both afternoons with every table full a lot of the time - we are working on getting more tables set up for the coming weekend.















It has been a lot of hard work for everyone onboard to run these events, with many people giving their days off, particularly to man the country stands. Heather and I were on the British stand on Sunday afternoon where we offer visitors a mince pie or roast chestnut, let kids right a letter to Santa and post it in our special post box, or throw snowballs in our tin can game to get to pull a Christmas cracker.





























It is great to be able to talk to the visitors and share more about why we are here and what we are doing. Heather was also singing with the carol singers again.









The winning American display





One other piece of good news is that we have now set a date for the Lloyds Register surveyors to come onboard and do our Passenger Ship Safety Certificate survey. The PSSC is the paper that we need to be allowed to sail from this port with all onboard. It is what we have been working towards for the past 2 years so to actually now have a date is very exciting. We expect the surveyors to come for a full week and then sign the certificate when they leave.
We hope to be able to sail within 2 weeks of getting the PSSC.

There will probably just be one more blog from us here in Denmark before we leave to travel home to Edinburgh for Christmas. We are taking the car to Amsterdam where we get the ferry over to Newcastle and then drive up to Edinburgh. We are all looking forward to the break and a rest as well as seeing family and friends over Christmas.

And there is more snow forcast for Friday. Yeah!

Christmas around the world

This weekend was a very special event for everyone onboard Logos Hope. We finally opened up the whole of deck 4 to the public with the bookfair and cafe fully open for the first time.














For the past 5 weeks, much of my time has been taken up with planning and organising this event. We are open the last weekend in November and the first 2 weekends of December.

We held a competition among the crew to produce the best country display and this resulted in a huge amount of effort being put into creating all the displays.














The Brits produced a street scene complete with chestnut barrow, postbox, lamp post and snow.














The Americans won the competition for best stand with their display that showed the inside and outside of a typical American home at Christmas.
On Thursday we had our first ever Official Opening. We had invited ambassadors from all the countries represented onboard, local goverment officials. business people and church leaders.














Despite only having a few weeks notice we were excited to welcome around 80 guests including ambassadors and representatives from 6 countries.
After a program in the Logos Lounge, we all went down to deck 4 for a ribbon cutting to officially open the book fair and Christmas around the world.































Our programme includes a live nativity with a goat and sheep, carol singing, displays from 14 countries and cultures showing Christmas around the world, life performances on the stage in our International Cafe, a kids zone and many other features.














Heather has been practicing for weeks as part of the street carol singers.
On Saturday we sent them and our mascot "El Capitano" out on the streets of Koge inviting shoppers to come and join us.














Over the whole weekend we were thrilled to welcome over 1100 visitors to the ship. It was so exciting to see the whole deck full of people and many people involved in good conversations with the visitors. The whole ships crew seemed to get involved at some point or other over the weekend and it has really got everyone excited.














Last week was also a very busy week with lots of visitors including my boss Mark and old friends from Australia that we haven't seen for about 8 years. It was great to catch up with them as they are on a 3 month trip to give their daughters missions exposure in different parts of the world.

































Sadly on Wednesday we said goodbye to the snow which had been here since Friday. Hopefully we will get more before too long.
Just 17 days until we leave to go home for Christmas.

Heather's birthday

This week has been absolutely crazy busy which is why this blog entry is coming so late.
Heather is now back working full time as nurse in the clinic again so you can all stop the comments about her cooking in the galley - actually she never did any cooking.

Heather has also been spending time teaching mime to a number of the ships company but last Sunday she actually got to perform when a local Danish church that we are closely partnering with joined us for a special Sunday service

Last weekend was Heather's birthday and we had an amazing time.
Our friend Colin flew out from Edinburgh on the Thursday night to visit and it was exciting for him to see the ship for the first time since March and see all the progress.
On Friday evening we went to the cinema and saw the new James Bond film and the last sequence is in Russia and it's snowing. When the film ended and they opened the side doors, it was snowing outside. The town square looked beautiful covered in a white blanket.
We were joined by Pauline who is also from our church and went to a cafe on the corner of the square where we sat for hours enjoying watching the snow fall and chatting. We waited until after 12 to sing happy birthday to Heather then headed out to the square. We met a group from the ship out for a walk and had a great big snowball fight in the town square. For a number of these people from places like South America and South Africa, this was their first time in snow.





























On Saturday, we went to Tivoli in Copenhagen, the world famous funpark in the city centre. Each year they convert the park to a Christmas wonderland and we got to go when the snow was lying on the ground and the sun was shining. I can only describe it as magical. For those that love Christmas as much as us, this was a great experience. We were joined by a few ship friends and some Danish friends.

We had a great day and into the night, enjoying all the rides and all the sights sounds and smells of Tivoli Christmas, which we got into free thanks to some Danish friends. We had expected to leave after eating our evening meal but ended up staying until after 10pm. This was mainly due to having so much fun on the rides and managing to get Colin and Pauline on rides they had never done before, like the Demon roller coaster and the great big drop.















On Sunday evening and Monday evening it snowed again so we were able to enjoy a few more snowball fights before the snow disappeared on Wednesday. On Monday we were able to send a couple of people with a van to cut down Christmas trees for the ship. It would have been great to go and cut down your own tree in the snow but we were just too busy to go.

The reason that the rest of this week was so busy was because we have been getting ready to open the ship for 3 weekends for our Christmas around the world programme. This is the first time we are really fully using our visitor deck with the book fair and the cafe fully operational.
We had an official opening on Thursday which we invited ambassadors, civic leaders, business people and church representatives to. It was the first Official Opening ever held on Logos Hope.
It was unique in many ways but the most unusual is the fact that we had a real goat which is part of our live nativity.
We also have created 12 different country / continent / cultural stands showing what Christmas means in our different places. This has really got the community very excited and involved, particularly because we ran a competition for the best stand.

Lots more to come about this weekend's opening very soon.

A weekend in Sweden

One of the great things about living on the ship is building relationships with people from all over the world. The fact that we live and work together 24/7 means that you can build stronger friendships that last for many years.

A number of weeks ago, we returned to the ship from an outing and ran into a Swedish couple who we had spent a year with on Doulos. They had both worked in the book fair when I was manager. We immediately hit it off again and they invited us to come and visit them at their home in Sweden. So on Saturday morning, we travelled up to the top of this island and got a ferry across the short water way to Hellingor in Sweden. It was just a 40 mins drive up to their home.

We had a fantastic time at their home. They have 3 children, similar ages to ours and a lovely house. We went out to a Swedish Christmas market in the afternoon and then had a meal of Elk that evening. When the kids were settled, we watched some of the old video footage from our shared time on Doulos.

It was amazing how easy it was to get along with this couple after all this time.

Joakim and Jenny are part of a small local church who have a great outreach to their local community. They actually meet in the middle of Sunday afternoon because they know that most people like to have a long lie in on a Sunday morning.

Before the service starts they have a cafe where they invite people to come for coffee and cake.

They only meet every other week because of the amount of work that is put into organising each service. But they get alongside people in small groups and in other ways.

Joakim and Jenny are both great singers and musicians and lead a gospel choir.

It was great to be able to get off the ship for a weekend and stay in a normal home.

This week everyone is working hard to get the ship ready for opening to the public next weekend. Tonight our friend Colin arrives from Edinburgh and we are really looking forward to catching up with him on all that is happening at home.

Saturday is Heather's birthday and so we are all going to Tivoli in Copenhagen for their Christmas opening.

Ship family

Tonight has been "Ship Family Night" so I thought it might be nice to introduce you to our ship family. 

Every one who joins the ship for more than a few weeks will normally be put into a family so they have a small group that they can bond and interact with. As with any large community, like a church, it is difficult to get to know everybody well. So the ship families give us all the opportunity to get to know a small group better. For the Packwood family, it is about having fun and creating an atmosphere where young people far from their relatives can feel at home.

This is our ship family. 

At the back from left to right are Wendy & Frank from Arizona, USA - Wendy just left yesterday and Frank leaves in 2 weeks. They will return next Spring. Naomi from Japan, Rob from Australia who is my IT Manager, Paul from South Korea, Heather then Mel from Canada.

Next to me at the front is Reuben from Mexico and then Jael from the Netherlands is on the far right.

We normally meet for supper together and will then do some kind of activity together. Sometimes it will be watching a movie or playing a game in our cabin. One week we went for a mystery tour in a ship van, driving around Kiel before ending up at McDonalds. Tonight we played the game sardines all over one of the decks.

Every couple of months we also have our weekly prayer night in ship families, giving us chance to pray for each other.

Ship families are a great part of ship life and it is interesting having 8 or 9 kids in your family.

The coming weeks are going to be very exciting. This coming weekend we are going to visit old Doulos friends in Sweden. Then on 20th our best friend Colin arrives from Edinburgh to help celebrate Heather's birthday on 22nd November which we hope to spend at Tivoli's Christmas celebration. Then before you know it, we will be opening up the ship to the public for 3 weekends for our "Christmas around the world" spectacular. 

Watch this space for all the updates.

Ship life is never boring

Sometimes it is easy to forget just how different life is when you live on a ship. Things that we accept as quite normal are probably not normal for all of you living onshore. 

This past weekend, a group  of Danish teenagers came onboard for a "Teen Street" Reunion.

Teen Street is a huge week long congress put on by OM for teens every summer with over 5000 participants from across Europe and beyond. So this was an opportunity for 50 Danish teens to come and spend 2 days on Logos Hope, experiencing life onboard and having a great reunion.

On Saturday they took part in a wide range of games and activities that included - a race using a fire house to push life rings along the quayside, another race that involved dressing up in an emersion suit, throwing heaving lines at a target and dressing up in a fire suit. 

These are not the kind of activities your average teen gets to do in their church youth group.

On Saturday night they had a huge praise party which at Teen Street is called The Throne Room, which many of the ships company joined in. This was a great chance for one of our bands to really have fun and also put our new sound and light system through its paces.

Later on they had hot chocolate up on deck 9, then sat up watching movies.

They then had the joy of sleeping in some of the great new dormatory cabins that have been built especially for teams of young people coming to the ship.

For this group of Danish teenagers, living on a ship for a weekend was a fantastic experience and most did not want to leave at the end.

In other news - the new sewage treatment plant came into service this week - sorry no pictures but it is another step towards finishing the ship. The official opening of the staff and school library's took place last week. As a ministry known for our books and our training, it is important to have good resources onboard. 

The opening of the school library included a special reading time for the children where one of the teachers read out stories the kids had written. Here Kara's teacher is reading out her story.

The plans for Christmas opening are well under way. We plan to be open the last weekend in November and the first 2 weekends in December. One highlight will be a live nativity and we have been given permission by the captain to have live animals so we are currently looking for sheep, goats and a donkey to be part of it! We are not sure yet what we will do with them all overnight!

On Monday night there was a special evening where many of the ships company who have been learning different creative ministry skills such as drama, mime, story telling, clowning etc, got to demonstrate what they have learnt to the ships community. Heather has been teaching mime to a group and it was encouraging to see 2 of her pupils perform.

Last week, Heather and I decided to begin having Spanish lessons. Not sure how much we will actually learn in the coming weeks but as the kids are already well ahead of us with their Spanish, we thought we should give it a try. 

And finally, Heather was shocked today to receive an email from Amazon confirming the order for a Peter Pan DVD. The only problem was that neither Heather nor I had ordered it.

Somehow, Kara had managed to get onto the Amazon website, find the DVD, put it in a shopping basket and then order it. We think we have a future computer geek on our hands.

However, we had to cancel the order because it wasn't done through this blogsite so we wouldn't get any commission! Don't forget to come here first before YOU order anything from Amazon.

Do your Christmas shopping right here with Amazon

Have you started your Christmas shopping yet? Maybe you have finished it.
If you live in the UK and would like to shop the easy way, why not do it online with Amazon and at the same time help support the Packwoods on Logos Hope.
As Amazon Associates, we can get a small commission for every order that is placed via our blog site. All you need to do is remember every time you want to buy anything from Amazon.co.uk to come here first and click on a link on the right.
You get your presents delivered to your door at great prices, and we get some money towards our support. Everyone wins. So please do remember us when you are doing your Christmas shopping or at any time of year.

Life gets busier

This past week has been fairly hectic. Life is certainly getting busier for many of us onboard, but particularly for me - Steve.

After much discussion and reviewing of all the work required to obtain our PSSC, we have come to the conclusion that we will definitely not be sailing before the end of the year. So we are now planning for Christmas here in Koge. We as a family had already made the decision to travel back to Edinburgh over Christmas as we need to return our car to Edinburgh before the ship starts sailing and I need some dental treatment over several visits which I can't get here onboard. So we will be in the UK from 20/12 to 4/1.

As the ship will be here for Christmas, we really want to open up the doors and invite the people of Denmark to come onboard so that we can share about the hope of Christmas and also give them the opportunity to buy our books and music in the bookshop.

Because the person overall responsible for the area of Public Ministries (Bookfair, Events, Visitor Experience etc) just doesn't have the capacity to take on this project, I have agreed to run it.

There will be a lot more to share about this in the coming weeks but basically we have 5 weeks to get everything set up and publicise the opening to get maximum visitors.

Also this week, our ships director, Mike, left for 10 days and for some strange reason decided to make me "acting director." I keep telling everyone that Mike does the directing and I do the acting.

Remarkably, as Mike was walking off the ship on Thursday morning, a group of highly influential Christian leaders from London were walking onboard for a days visit. So of course, I had the privilege of helping to host them for the day.

The ship is planning to visit London next summer, and this delegation visited to get a better understanding of what the Logos Hope is all about and how they can help facilitate the visit.

It was a remarkable visit as this group have so much vision and passion for the London visit and are so well connected that we are all very excited about all the posibilities.

We hope to have some definite dates for the UK visit soon, but of course we remain dependant on getting our PSSC and being able to sail.

Also this week, an old cabin mate from my early Doulos days arrived onboard for a visit and it was great to catch up. He encouraged us to shout a bit more loudly about all the work that has been finished because many people still think the ship is a building site.

The video below helps to show just how much has been completed.

This week the ship and children's librarys have been completed and the official opening is on Monday with yours trully having to give a speech and hand out the thank you gifts to the American team who have spent hundreds of hours sorting and cataloguing the books. Pictures to follow next week.

This week saw our first ever Vision Team coming to spend a week experiencing what ship life is like. A group of young German girls from Kiel came and stayed in our special dormitary style cabin and took part in training, work and ministry opportunities. We hope many more Vision Teams will come in the months and years to come.