Saturday Sept 15th – Last Day at Sea

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Hello again from the Queen Mary 2. Our crossing is rapidly coming to an end so it is disappointing that we had to start packing in preparation to disembark tomorrow. As such it has been a fairly quiet (not attending a lot of the organized activities) day for us.

We got up and headed off to the dining room for a final leisure breakfast. Tomorrow will be a hectic job of getting out of the cabin and hauling our last few belongings through the buffet. So today we took our time and had a 3 course breakfast. First came the fruit juice, pastries, and fruit course. Then we had the meat and eggs (Janet had bacon and fried eggs while David had an omelet and kippers). The 3^rd course was French Toast for Janet and Waffles for David.

Our steward (Ferdinand) was not finished cleaning our cabin so we went down to the Chart Room after breakfast to sit and read. Janet was able to catch up again on the e-mail and we are happy there were no new announcements of injury or illness. We are down to only 3 able-bodied grandchildren, with Tessa’s broken arm and Abbigail having broken her collarbone about a week before we left on the trip. We got an encouraging note from Elizabeth so we know all is well with our own house & cat.

As we prepare to conclude the first phase of our vacation, we have tried to repack the suitcases to make them as organized as possible for phase-2. We will be spending several days in London and would like to be able to leave some of the clothes (at least many of the more formal outfits) packed and prepared for later on when we join another ship to begin phase-3. This is a little tricky in that we only have loose plans for what we will do in London so we aren’t sure what we will need to wear – also are unsure of the weather during that time.

At noon we advanced the clocks one final time. This is the 5^th straight 23-hour day but our watches are now set to London Time. That should eliminate at least one confusion factor for tomorrow. It did mean that it had quickly become 2:00 and we had not had lunch yet. We weren’t really feeling hungry yet so we substituted a little nap time instead.

3:00 was the final meeting of the QM2 Knitters. We each got a small plate of cheese and crackers before Janet went to her meeting and David went to the pub for another pint of London Pride Ale. We have some credits which we have not used yet and cannot convert to cash, so we might as well use them some way. This is how David is preparing himself for life in London the next several days.

About 4:30 the ship official finished crossing the Atlantic Ocean as we entered the English Channel by passing just south of Bishop’s Rock. During the night we will pick up a harbor pilot from the Isle of Wright and this will be our guide into Southampton. We have neglected to give much in the way of daily weather reports – today was mostly sunny with breezes across the deck and temperatures in the low 60. This has been fairly typical the last few days.

At 5:15 there was a Catholic Vigil Mass in the Connections Room under the Illuminations Room. It was a nice quick little service and then we went to our “last supper” aboard this ship at 6:00. Tonight Janet had Caesar Salad and David had Southwest Quinoa Salad. We both had the Sirloin Steak dinner and then we both had the Cherry Strudel with Vanilla Ice Cream. It was good again and we enjoyed a last visit with our tablemates – Chris & Neal and Trish & Derek.

After dinner we returned to our cabin and packed the last few things we could in the suitcases before putting them out for collection. All 3 bags were picked up in about 5 minutes and we expect to retrieve them in the cruise terminal tomorrow. We still have a couple of little bags for our overnight and morning items, but we have done this often enough to have confidence in our ability to get everything off the ship.

We went to the Royal Court Theater for our last QM2 live show. It began with a 10-min session from the ships singer & dancers. Then came a full show from Gary Lovini playing his fiddle. We saw one of his shows earlier in the crossing and it was very good. We enjoyed tonight’s show even more so. It was an excellent way to finish our entertainment on this ship.

An interesting item we haven’t mentioned so far: On the TV they have one channel that just shows Japanese shows. There is another which is exclusively German, a third for Spanish, and a fourth for French. It was funny to scroll through the channels and find Yoda in a “Star Wars” movie speaking Japanese, but it was really weird to watch Churchill for “The Darkest Hour” speaking German about the evil Germans during the war.

That pretty well wraps up today’s episode, but there will be more vacation updates as we explore some of the sites in London during the coming days. Good night for now.

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Comments

[Jerry and Joyce]

Sounds like it was a good trip across the ocean.
Sounds like the first leg of your trip has gone well. Food sounds good. Have fun on the next part of your adventure! Jerry and Joyce