Uh-oh. Getting a bit behind on this 30-day challenge. Time for some shorties...
Not really a "past life" as such, but something interesting I did a while ago that was brought back to mind by the Costa Concordia cock-up. I've not spent a lot of time on big ships, indeed until 2007, I think the only larger vessels I'd been on were ferries, cross-Channel or around the Greek islands.
In April 2007 though, I went to Canada for a big trip, mostly to visit some potential future places to live and work and to attend a workshop at the Banff International Research Station. I flew out to Vancouver, took a ferry to Vancouver Island where I visited UVic (ended up working there for a couple of years afterwards), then travelled east by train. I made it as far east as Halifax, Nova Scotia, all by train. That was a pretty cool experience in itself, but I'd had a wacky idea for how to get home from Canada to the UK. It's possible to book passage on container ships under some circumstances, which I decided to do. It's a tricky process, not super cheap, and the logistics of making the rendezvous with the ship turned out to be a bit more "interesting" than I expected.