Sept. 17, 2016

The Queen Mary 2 docked at Southampton at 6:30 this morning, and after disembarkation I took a taxi to a hotel, rather than deal with going straight to the train and up to London. I’m doing the whole trip the old-fashioned way – only 14 days from Edmonds to the UK; the wonders of modern travel and not once have I had to take my shoes off, or go through a body scan, or eat airplane food!

This is a very nice hotel, but you know you’re in England when the receptionist tells you that there’s been “something of a muddle” in the kitchen: “Our cook is unreliable and hasn’t appeared yet.” However, breakfast will be served in the hotel just down the street. Where the eggs Benedict were on top of ham still cold from the fridge – and another item was “smashed avocado on toast.” (“Of course it’s fresh, the cook just stepped on it!”) – which I didn’t have the courage to try.

That aside, a lovely stay in a small boutique hotel just off the Southampton docks — the Cargo Hotel: clean, quiet, very friendly. Add the Cargo to the list! (Note to Edmonds: While waiting for my taxi to the station I counted seven sidewalk signs in one block, adding a pleasant note of cosmopolitan variety. Oddly, they don’t seem to have choked off commerce or resulted in enough serious chaos and injury to warrant banning them. Hearty people, the Southamptonians!)

I regret to say that I didn’t see much of Southampton, except look around from my taxis and note that almost all the buildings are post-war. The city and harbor took a tremendous beating during the war and had to be largely rebuilt.

I took the noon train up to London. It’s always “up” to London, no matter where you are in the UK. Except for Oxford and Cambridge, which are “up” if you are going to one or the other as a student; otherwise it’s “down” to Oxford or Cambridge – unless you’re being “sent down,” which means you have done something very bad indeed. There, simple, isn’t it?

So now I’m in London, in the Charing Cross Hotel, and finally have a decent Internet connection and the time to write. The ride up on the train was a reminder of how good and convenient and useful frequent, regular train service can be. Though the wi-fi was terrible, putting a question mark after British Rail’s optimistic assertions about how much work you can get done on the train. (Note to Montana and North Dakota: the British appear to have found a way to dispose of broken chairs, worn-out mattresses and old refrigerators without dumping them down by the tracks – what do they know that we don’t?)

The Queen Mary 2 was fantastic. The first glimpse, at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, was amazing. It’s HUGE, and brought Bea Lillie’s very apt “When does this place get to New York?” to mind.

It’s hard to imagine anything done better than Cunard does (almost – see below) everything. Service was outstanding, food superb, the wine list mouth-watering and largely beyond my wildest “what did I just do?” credit card moments. And while we’re on wine, the wine stewards have the neatest new gizmo that allows you to extract a tiny (or larger) drink from the most expensive wine without opening it and exposing it to air: the Coravin – Google it – I’ve already bought one for a friend.

The ship is over 1,000 feet long, and has 12 decks – but even so looks and feels more like a “ship” than a “cruise ship” – not like one of those lumbering floating hotels that look like a block of apartments on a barge. The QM2 retains much of the grace of her predecessor.

A footnote: This was a sort of pilgrimage for me, as well as a pleasure trip. In 1942 my Aunt Nancy, Dad’s sister, went over as a Red Cross officer on the original Queen Mary, with the first American division to be sent to England. She spent the war in England, got bombed by V1 and V2 rockets, and was in Normandy about 10 days after the Invasion. I thought of her often during the trip, with admiration and deep affection. But back to the present ship…

Exercise is easy. Apart from the well-equipped gym, the promenade deck – deck 7 – gives you one-third of a mile per lap with a view of the sea all round. Just avoid going the wrong way: You’ll be trampled to death by all the walkers, power walkers and joggers who swarm the deck in all kinds of weather!

Weather is no problem: We hit some Force 8 winds and took on a bit of pitch and roll, but the stabilizers keep the things pretty even – not at all like the wallowing I experienced in a much smaller ship on my first trip to Europe in 1966, when we hit a hurricane and had to heave to for 36 hours!

There are restaurants all over the place, and food is “free” – part of the fare. I mostly ate in the Britannia Dining Room, and I have to say I enjoyed the dress code: jackets (ties optional) on informal evenings, tuxedo or dark suit on formal evenings. Some may object, like the dour gentleman who sat across from me in a short-sleeve shirt on informal nights and a short-sleeve shirt and a tie on formal nights – but then he never had any wine on his table and never cracked a smile, either. The dress code adds a very special atmosphere to great dining on a great ship, and evening clothes make you feel that you are part of the grand old tradition of trans-Atlantic liners.

One odd thing about the Britannia Dining Room: It seems to have an extremely strong magnetic field. Every time I set off to explore the ship (“I have trod a maze indeed through forthrights and meanders”) I would come around a corner, and there it would be again: the Britannia Restaurant. This is probably due to my ability to get lost on the ship – you can’t tell starboard from port when you’re in one of the seemingly endless passageways and shops and lounges and bars and stairways. It’s also due to the fact that the Britannia Restaurant occupies four decks, bang amidships. It’s welcome to as many decks as it needs, but never leave home without your handy folding ship’s map! (There is a legend that a party set out from their stateroom on the aft end of Deck 3 to find the library on the forward end of deck 9, and have been lost ever since, foraging in the lifeboats for food as they search vainly for recognizable landmarks. They forgot their map.)

The stateroom was a real delight. It was much larger than I had thought – and much, much larger than the one I shared with three others in back in 1966. The stateroom included a very modern and extremely nice bathroom with shower, large closets, tons of drawers, a desk – and best of all – two enormous “windows.” They called them “portholes” in the prospectus, so I was prepared for 10 inches of heavy glazing and lots of screws and brass. But no: almost picture windows, with a clever little squirter thing on the outside that flooded the windows every morning and kept them clean. I could sit for hours and watch the sea, not that far below deck 3, where my cabin was located.

My cabin steward, like many of the staff, was Puerto Rican, and the perfect model of helpfulness and good cheer. Staff are “tipped” as part of a daily charge on your bill, but I left Charles $40 and a thank-you note. He added much to the trip.

Now the downs: Embarkation felt about as organized as a riot. This is probably due to it being a British “system” (a word they use here to denote controlled chaos and a spirit of muddling through somehow), and it took forever, even in the “express” (read “not quite as long”) line. Once through check-in, a long hallway and a series of escalators and stairs and ramps, to be greeted at the door by two very nice people checking tickets — actually a little bar-coded, plastic card with a magnetic strip that works as ID, room key and on-board credit card (purchases are credited to your account, backed by your real credit card). This makes going crazy in the duty-free shops easy, and wildly extravagant orders from the wine list deliriously simple and quick).

Anyway, the two very nice people who checked me aboard seemed to have very little idea where my stateroom might actually be, though it “might be” down that way. After all, they’re British, and they were very nice about not knowing, in that apologetic way that Brits often have, which makes you feel as if you should comfort them for not knowing, perhaps with a cup of nice, hot tea.

Disembarking was much better, and done by deck, in order. But then came the taxi line, which was very long and very slow – but that’s Southampton at work, not Cunard. After all, who could have known that the Queen Mary was due in that day? (Which is not unlike US Customs at the airport, which always seem to be taken by surprise when you arrive home in the U.S. After all, who could have known there was a 747 about to arrive?)

The other real glitch on Cunard’s otherwise faultless performance was the Internet. A) It cost the earth: almost 50 cents per minute, and B) it was the slowest Internet service I’ve ever watched time out since my rural party line dial-up in British Columbia. About half the fortune I spent on the Internet connection was drained away waiting for something – anything!

So there it is. In spite of the two frustrations above, this was a truly wonderful trip. I kept finding myself sighing with sheer pleasure whether dining, staring out to sea or just being on the Queen Mary. If you can – do it! I don’t know when I‘ve had a better or more relaxing time.

I go to Savile Row Monday to be measured for a suit, then off on the next leg of the trip: The North — a cottage in Corbridge with my friends Ann and Karl, a week visiting Hadrian’s Wall and the various museums and reconstructed forts that lie along it. Karl and I plan to spend most of a day crawling around the Leda class frigate Trincomalee, docked in Hartlepool. Ann says she’ll do something else, and let us “geek out” on the ship, the only defense when avid Patrick O’Brian devotees get turned loose on a real, period sailing ship.

— By Nathaniel Brown

Edmonds resident Nathaniel Brown taught and coached cross-country running and skiing for 16 years before joining the US Biathlon Team as wax technician, switching to the U.S. Cross-Country team in 1989. He coached at three Olympics and 14 World Championships, edited Nordic Update for nine years and Cross-Country Skier for two. He has written three books on skiing and training. He owned and operated Nordic UltraTune, an international freelance ski tuning service, until retirement six years ago