Ss France @ MindSay

I'm still out here.  It's been taking me longer to put together my S/S Norway collection of posts than I thought it was going to.  Every time I think I have it wrapped up, I find some more information that fills in a gap or further substantiates a suspicion.  Plus, I'm the toughest editor I know.  Each time I read what I have I end up ripping a large section of it apart and rewriting it.

The good news is that if you like it, there's a lot more of it to read than I thought there was going to be.  The bad news is that if you don't like it... well, you can figure it out.

I'm probably going to be a little quiet around here for the next week or so.  Though, I will be writing and Mindsay will get to see the fruits of that labor.  After mentioning the SS Norway in passing in a post earlier this week, I decided that I'm going to write much more about her.  But what I want to write about can't be addressed in one single post.  It will probably be a multi-part series about the ship and her demise.  I want to write briefly about her history, then go all nostalgic and write just a little about my experiences with her, but then spend the majority of the posts writing about her final 5 years.  It may not sound that interesting on the surface, but please trust me when I say it is.

The last 5 years is where things really got crazy.  Corporate greed and a corrupt government on the other side of the world not only lead to the loss of the SS Norway, but people's lives as well.  I've spent the last 2 months reading all I could about the tragic end of this great liner.  There is a lot more information out there than I thought there would be, but a lot of it is rumor and speculation presented as fact by people that are just as passionate about the ship as I am, if not more passionate.  It has taken me a long time to cross-reference and validate what was truth vs. what was rumor.  Except for one 30 day period where almost all news about the ship stopped, I've been able to verify everything.  Unfortunately, it was during those 30 days that her fate was sealed and no one is positive about what happened.  I will be speculating about what happened during those 30 days, but I will be sure to point out what is fact and what are my thoughts based on the little information that is available.

As I write this, The SS Norway is being scrapped on a beach on the coast of India.  She can't be saved and there's nothing that can be done but remember her.  The series of posts that will eventually follow this one is going to be one of the ways that I will remember her.  I hope that you'll read them.  If anything, those posts should be a shocking look at the terrible things that some companies and countries can and will do.

Sometime during 2006, NCL quietly began tendering passengers back and forth between their large ships and their private island, Grand Stirrup Cay, using Little Norway I and Little Norway II.

I understand that other than my three closest friends, nobody here probably has any idea what the SS Norway even is, and even those friends of mine probably have no clue what the Little Norway I and Little Norway II are.  All I really need to say is that I've been researching the tragic and corporate greed driven destruction of the SS Norway for weeks and this is the first time I've smiled while doing it.

For a company that has gone out of their way to remove all traces of their relationship with the Grand Dame of the Caribbean, it's nice to see that someone within that same company went out of their way to preserve her legacy.  Little Norway I and Little Norway II had to be refurbished before resuming service and this was the perfect time to rename them and paint over any reference to the SS Norway.  Instead, the tenders not only kept their names, but had the original 1979 logo of the SS Norway beautifully restored as part of their name designations.

The SS Norway may never cruise again, but her little ones still do.