Year 50

Day 115: We’re (finally) off the boat and in London! The QMII docked in Southampton this morning, and we were very ready to move on. While the trans-Atlantic crossing was a really neat thing to do, with a lot of fun ties to history, we’re now pretty sure that that’s not a thing that we’d be intereste in doing again. Seven days at sea is a long time, and when you factor in the obviously high risk of getting ill…well. It was worth doing and the first half was a lot of fun; the tedious latter half, though, we’re happy to see the end of.

So, we disembarked in Southampton, caught a cab to the Southampton train station, a train to London Waterloo station, a London black cab to the Tower Hotel, and checked into a room with the most incredible view I’ve ever had in a hotel room.

After getting settled in, we walked across Tower Bridge and got dinner. Once we got back to the hotel, my wife (who was hit much harder by the bug that I was) needed rest, so I went out and took a two-hour walk enjoying the London evening and taking photos before finally coming back and heading to bed.

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Day 114: Another day of holing up in our stateroom to concentrate on resting and trying not to let whatever bug bit us get any worse. I almost forgot to get a picture, but then remembered that I’d planned ahead and made sure to include some thematically (in)approprite viewing choices for us, including this one on the history of the Cunard Line.

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Day 113: Most of the day was spent hiding in our room, so as to rest and avoid possibly infecting anyone else. The second big gala event of the voyage was tonight, with a 1920s theme, and as we didn’t want to entirely miss it, we got dressed up and ventured out for about an hour (masked the entire time, aside from a couple brief moments to have our photos taken). Once we’d been there long enough to say we’d been there, it was back to our room and back to bed.

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Day 112: The day started well, with another history lecture, a cute new haircut for my wife, and an attempt at afternoon tea. However, about the time tea started…disaster! Well, no, not disaster, but a hearty amount of grumbling and annoyance. A few days ago at dinner before the Red and Gold gala event, we had a couple sit at the table next to us, and one of them was obviously ill: sniffling, sneezing, coughing, and bleary-eyed, all the time assuring us that he “wasn’t contagious” and it was “oh, nothing, just some little virus thing”. In hindsight, we should have excused ourselves, but between wanting to enjoy the evening and general social pressures, we stayed…and today was the day when we started feeling the effects of that decision. COVID testing has come back negative, so we’re hopeful that this is “just” a cold or flu.

So, we cut tea short, went back to our room, and spent the evening resting and preparing for our upcoming London adventures…otherwise known as watching Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary. That counts as research, right?

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Day 111: Today was a second astrophysics lecture, a history lecture by Giles Ramsay about British actress and spy Aphra Behn, and an evening dancing to pop tunes by the in-house cover band. Since this is a trans-Atlantic voyage without any stops, there’s a lot more day and evening programming since there aren’t ports of call and shore excursions to keep the travelers distracted.

Day 110: Today included watching England fall to Spain in the final match of the Women’s World Cup (to great dismay among the fans gathered in the ship’s onboard pub), the first in a series of four talks by astrophysicist Prof. Nathan Mayne of the University of Exeter about our search for habitable extrasolar worlds, a (somewhat entry level) planetarium show, a live performance by acapella-with-drums vocal performance group ODY-C (technically fine but missing any real spark, making them dull and lifeless; basically Pentatonix for people who don’t want to risk raising their heart rate), closing out with big band music on the big dance floor and dancing to a fun pop cover band and DJ in the ship’s nightclub.

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Day 109: We’re on a boat! The Queen Mary II, to be precise, the only currently running ocean liner (as opposed to cruise ship). We departed from New York City yesterday, and are working our way out into the Atlantic Ocean. Tonight is the first of the trip’s two “gala nights”, this one with a “Red and Gold” theme, so we made sure to dress for the occasion.

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Day 108: We’ve taken a transcontinental train trip and spent two nights in New York City…but this trip isn’t over yet! The destination…well, perhaps may be guessed? Hope you’re having fun playing our game!

Though it should be noted that further photo-a-day posts will likely not appear for about a week; I’ll backdate them when they get posted.

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Day 107: Last night, after posting yesterday’s photo for the day, we went to look at Times Square at night and ended up hopping on a very fun open-air double-decker bus tour of major NYC landmarks before coming back to the hotel and crashing. Today, after finally enjoying a night’s sleep in actual human-size beds, we walked from our hotel up to Central Park, stopping off on the way to get bagels for breakfast. We spent a couple hours just wandering through the park, and then headed to the Museum of Natural History. Another couple hours there, and then (12,000+ steps and nearly six miles later) gave our feet a rest and caught a taxi back to the hotel. Now resting before heading off for this evening’s entertainment.

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Day 106: Hello New York City! We have completed our transcontinental railway journey, from sea to shining sea (though we haven’t yet seen the sea on this side of the continent yet, we expect we probably will soon). We left Chicago yesterday evening on the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited, slept through Indiana (my apologies to my Indiana relatives), woke up midway through Ohio, got a brief glimpse of Pennsylvania, and then worked our way down the Hudson River until ending in NYC. Our hotel is less than half a mile from the train station, so we decided to walk (in hindsight, perhaps a minor miscalculation in 72° weather, but we made it), and the first thing we saw outside of the train station was Madison Square Garden. Now we’re enjoying relaxing in our hotel room (for all people chatter about tiny NYC hotel rooms, first, this isn’t that much smaller than most hotel rooms I’m used to, and second, three nights in an Amtrak sleeping cabin make this look positively palatial). The adventure continues!

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