7 weeks after we last saw it in Epsom our container arrived in Houston.

This container left Felixstowe, UK and sailed to Houston, USA via Bremerhaven, Germany and Charleston, USA as shown here:

The container arrived at the Port of Houston, after navigating up the Houston Ship Canal.

The first steamship travelled up this route in 1837 and Houston unloaded the world’s first container ship, the M/V Ideal X, in 1958.

Today the Port of Houston is the largest port in the USA by foreign tonnage (and second by total tonnage). 7,550 vessels carried more than 200 million tons of cargo through the Port of Houston in 2006.

Fortunately (although we didn’t know it at the time) the ship carrying our container arrived in the Port of Houston before Hurricane Ike hit. If it hadn’t we may still have been without our belongings since the storm wiped out the navigation buoys and damaged some of the docks.

To check that all the boxes arrived a large game of bingo is played. Removal men call out numbers and you have to check them off on a big grid.

But don’t call out “Two Little Ducks” when they shout out 22 as it will only confuse them.

Anyway, we had 357 boxes to count in. Unfortunately regular bingo only goes up to 90 so there isn’t a nickname for 357.

When the new super bingo game is introduced 357 can be either:

    -“Cup of tea” and “Heinz varieties” (“3” and “57”)

    -“Cup of tea” and “Man alive” and “Lucky for some” (“3”, “5” and “7”)

Or most likely:

“Man Alive” + “Legs” + “Unlucky for some” + “Key of the door” + “Two little ducks” + “Dirty Girtie” + “Droopy drawers” + “The Brighton line” + “Knock on the door” + “Two fat ladies” (“5” + “11” + “13” + “21” + “22” + “30” + “44” + “59” + “64” + “88”)

Although it might slow the game down a bit...