July 30, 2009
My Last Post
The New York harbor pilot was scheduled to board the Queen Mary 2 at 3:45 this morning. I hit the deck a few minutes after he boarded, apparently, because the pilot boat was gone, and the ship was starting to stand slowly up Ambrose Channel.
Ambrose doesn’t offer the same degree of challenge as The Brambles, but it’s difficult. New York’s harbor mouth isn’t deep enough for the big boys, so Ambrose Channel is dredged but narrow. A ship starts out heading west toward New Jersey in the channel, then make about a ninety-degree right turn and stands into the harbor under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.
When we picked up the pilot, I was one of only a handful of crazies on deck, but by the time we got to the narrows at about 5 am, several hundred people of all ages and descriptions were out on deck to watch the ship come in. When we passed under the bridge many (presumably Americans) burst into spontaneous applause.
Once in the harbor we headed for a pier in Brooklyn, rather than for the traditional landing at lower Manhattan on the Hudson River. I think this change was probably made for reasons of safety, cost, and to gain access to the city’s airports to the east without having to mess with Manhattan.
So you do pass abeam of the Statue of Liberty, but it’s on the opposite side of the harbor. We did get some nice views of it and lower Manhattan, however, and I tried to get some shots of our arrival using a tripod, as Barbara and I fought for space at the rail. The tripod was necessary because the ship docked at 6:06am, a few minutes before sunrise.
So ended our delightful twenty-five hour days at sea (you gain an hour every night westbound) eating, listening to great programs and music, and relaxing. We departed the ship at about 8am, reached LaGuardia airport about 9, and waited for our 3pm flight to Denver.
It was while jamming myself into an airline seat designed for somebody four feet six instead of six feet four, that I realized that our lovely, once-in-a-lifetime vacation in Britain, France, and on the sea was most emphatically over.
July 29, 2009
America Approaches
We’re still in very thick fog, with about a hundred yards of visibility. So we had two stormy days, one beautiful one, and two foggy ones. This morning we were south of Halifax, running southwest. By midnight or so we’ll be passing Mantauk Point on Long Island. The pilot’s call at Ambrose Channel, the entrance to New York harbor,ver is for 3:45am, so I may just stay up all night. Of course, if we’ve got this hundred-yard visibility all the way to the pier, there won’t be much point.
Tie up is at 6am(?!) at Brooklyn(?!) The Brooklyn thing I generally get, though it robs us of the classic moment of steaming past the Statue of Liberty. They don’t want to risk these big ships in the Hudson River (and perhaps can’t afford to use Manhattan real estate to moor ships nowadays).
The 6am I also get (it gives them a full day for turnaround, with departure in the evening), though I begrudge. As Michael Palin observed, the interesting part of sailing is when you’re in sight of land. Thanks to these dawn-and-dusk schedules you get a couple of hours, but only if you want to get up at 2am. So good for them, but bad for us. Well, I shall take what’s on offer . . . very early. A drowsy end to the trip of a lifetime.
July 28, 2009
Foggy
So much for the nice weather. Well we had one day. This morning found us on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland lost in fog. This is typical of summers in this part of the world, where the warm Gulf Stream hits the cold Labrador Current and Canadian jetstream.
Today’s Maxtone-Graham lecture was on the French liner Normandie, which, though she only had a six-year career before being destroyed by fire, is regarded by many as the stylistic apex of ocean liner development. The last lecture of an excellent series; almost worth the price of admission by themselves.
But the big news of the day is that I’m the QM2′s men’s shuffleboard champion (at least for today)! This victory was attained by beating two kids, as well as a gentleman my own age on a fantastically lucky shot. Other highlights of the day included attending a poetry reading with harp music, and more evening music for me. I also made my last medicinal experiment with a rum and coke. It tasted like coke-flavored paint thinner. I quit.
July 27, 2009
Floating
One of my favorite pleasures, on the days the alarm clock makes no demands, is to awaken slowly, floating gradually to the surface after I’ve had enough sleep. This morning I had the bonus delight of floating to a surface that was floating, as the bed moved very gently in our calm seas.
We’ve come through our squall, and have broken through into sunshine, clear skies, and relative warmth. The captain initially headed the ship southwest into the Atlantic to a position somewhat south of Paris before picking up a great circle toward New York, working us around the storm. We’re also leaving northern climes, which helps. Beautiful bright clear blue skies and dark blue seas; Barbara sighted some unidentified sea life this morning, and I’m hoping for a little star gazing this evening.
So today, they’ve reopened the viewing decks closed since the channel because of the winds, and I spent much of the afternoon trooping about on my shipboard routine of inspections so vital to the safe operation of the vessel. We had another of our Maxtone-Graham lectures this morning, complete with kilt, and I purchased the paperbacsk version of his book on this ship this afternoon (and another signing).
We had our nicest evening to date, with dinner, a condensed version of “The Importance of Being Earnest” by graduates of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and ended the evening in the ballroom listening to the big band. We even danced two of the slow dances. Since Barbara forgot to wear her steel-toed pumps we left it at that, fleeing the floor when they called for cha-chas or tangos.
July 26, 2009
Fun Twenty-five Hours a Day
We’re well out into the Atlantic now. Having cleared the coast of Africa, the first landfall to the south off of our balcony is Antarctica, which makes us wonder why our cabin steward closes the balcony curtain and locks its door every night. Maybe he’s concerned about James Bond landing on our balcony in a hang glider.
As often happens, they scheduled concurrently the only two things today that really interest me—Maxtone-Graham’s lecture and the ship’s shuffleboard tournament. Not a close call, really. We went to the lecture, a spellbinding account of his interviews with three Titanic survivors, one of whose memoirs he later edited and annotated. He has also been having book signings in the afternoon, so I (and all the other ocean liner groupies) bought a book and had it signed—in my case a copy of the survivor’s memoirs.
This ship is laid out in the new style. In the old days, cabins were located in the hull and public rooms in the superstructure, but to give everybody they can a balcony, they’ve reversed the traditional. The cabins are in the superstructure (we’re on deck 11), and the restaurants, show rooms, entertainment areas, and planetarium (if you need one) on the main deck (7) or within the hull below.
I have to admit, the balcony is a kick. I didn’t know how much I’d use it, but it is nice to sit out there isolated at least a bit from your five thousand fellow souls. It’s also great for playing the pipe, with two steel walls and a glass backdrop opening to the sea. Makes my wheezy fife playing sound like a church organ (though I try to peek around corners to see that no neighbors are out before I start sandblasting).
My one criticism of layout is that the ship isn’t really designed very well for one to look forward. The open-deck viewing areas forward are usually closed because of high winds, while the inside spaces forward are devoted to such pursuits as a gym, a bridge (cards) club, and the library. These are all fine things to have, but all involve people doing other things than watching the view. Put them down in the bilge. (It’s a giant, designed version of people who get window seats on airplanes and spend the whole flight reading—antagonizing.)
I enjoyed some good jazz this evening, with three sets, each peopled by a different combination of musicians, two quintets and the basic trio. Took the opportunity to try some rum. Not as caustic as scrumpy, and didn’t taste as much like a barrel as scotch, but beyond that I have no expertise.
The ship employs thirty-one musicians, at least that I’ve discovered. They can muster a fourteen-piece big band for the ballroom dance gigs or as a theater orchestra. They have a string quartet to play you into dinner, a five-piece reggae-disco combo for the dance club, a jazz trio for the lounge, a flute-piano duo, a harpist, and two piano-bar guys.
I’m certainly enjoying the music, as you can imagine, but can’t pretend to understand the economics of all this. To fly from Denver to London we paid sixty percent of what we’re paying to sail to New York and fly back to Denver. For the extra dollars we get much more civilized transportation, the services of thirty-one musicians, all the great food we can pack into ourselves, and six nights in their nice hotel. It must be the economics of scale—the savings of moving 3,000 passengers instead of 300. True, cargo (that’s us!) moves cheapest over water, but still. . . .
July 25, 2009
John Maxtone-Graham
(first day at sea):
So you’re going through boxes in the attic and you discover that beloved old jacket that you thought had been thrown out long ago. And while you’re celebrating that, you reach into one of the pockets and discover fifty bucks. Well that’s kind of where I am today. The ocean passage was good enough, but imagine my pleasure in discovering that we were taking it with, and would spend the crossing being lectured by, John Maxtone-Graham.
Maxtone-Graham, eighty this year, is one of the preeminent maritime historians, author of “The Only Way to Cross,” one of my favorite books. It was his first book, published in 1973, and a masterpiece. He’s going to spend the voyage lecturing on materials drawn from that and other books published since, and we got the first round today.
He lectures the way he writes, with great urbanity and aplomb. Today’s course was over the early years of the 20th century, and the competition between Cunard and its chief British rival, the White Star Line. More to follow. After the lecture I had the mahi-mahi for lunch, keeping up a personal shipboard tradition.
That modest storm predicted has arrived, with overcast skies and seas of seven to twelve feet, which our TV ship channel describes as “rough.” Makes you wonder what adjective they’d use to classify fifty-foot seas. Although the modern ship stabilizers eliminate rolling almost completely, they can’t do much about pitching, even on this giant ship.
So we’re bobbing around a little bit. Barbara finds any such motion unsettling, and has done the sensible thing and headed for bed. I set out this evening to explore the ship, included my patented lowest, farthest aft (for a passenger) vibration test. In this case it’s a disco, sitting maybe forty feet over four large screws turning three revolutions per second, and the only vibrations came from the band. Pretty impressive engineering.
July 24, 2009
And Thence to Sea
Thirty years ago, when I was in the Coast Guard working as a ship traffic monitor in Seattle, we used have a Puget Sound pilot who would radio: “Seattle Traffic [that was us], freighter Westward Venture outbound from Tacoma to Port Angeles to disembark pilot [that was him], and thence to sea.” I always thought “And Thence To Sea” would be about the best possible title for a novel, but since I don’t have a novel in me a blog post will have to do.
We took, regrettably, our last train ride in Britain this morning, an hour from Winchester to Southampton. We got there about 11am, and so had two hours to kill before we could embark on Queen Mary 2. We boarded what we understood to be the bus that would get us to the proper pier, but ended up at the ferry pier rather than the ocean pier.
So from there, making best of it, we walked the waterfront a bit and by complete accident blundered into the Southampton maritime museum, located in the old wool storage warehouse. (This building also served as a prison during the Napoleonic wars, and they say that you can see the names of French prisoners carved into the beams. Of course I forgot to look.)
Well I always say, when life gives you maritime museums . . . visit. They had some nice exhibits on Southampton’s maritime history, which really got a boost after 1840, when railroads made this port a faster gateway to London than most. The real boom years came after 1900, when the major trans-Atlantic passenger carriers shifted there from Liverpool to be closer to both London and the Continent.
So the museum told that story and featured a nice model of the harbor as it appeared in the 1930s, when it served not just the great liners, but as a major cargo port. (The model included the port’s large cold storage wearhouses, and reported that after the Luftwaffe visited in 1940, the melting butter burned for two weeks.)
This museum also had its Titanic exhibit, but it comes with better bona fides than most. Although Titanic had Liverpool on her stern as her home port, the ship actually operated out of Southampton, from whence came a large part of her crew. The disaster left numerous bereaved in the city.
So after our last spot of history and culture in Britain, we grabbed a bit of lunch at the ferry terminal, then took a cab to Dock 4, Ocean Terminal. Check-in with the mob took only half an hour (I seem to remember the QE2′s twelve years ago was longer), and before 2pm, we and a zillion new shipmates were wandering around the behemoth looking for our cabins.
Now for superstitious types, Friday sailings are regarded as asking for trouble. Supposed to derive, as I recall, from religious sailors not wanting to take leave of shore on the day Christ died. We had two omens upon departure, however, that should nullify it. One was a large photo in the terminal of Hoagy Carmichael (personal hero) and his wife embarking (part of Cunard’s extensive stars-going-to-sea publicity, though I doubt any looney but me recognized him). The other was a half rainbow off the port bow as we stood out toward the channel from Southampton.
I’ll get into the ship’s layout in a day or two. Suffice for now to say that she’s the biggest vessel I’ve ever been on (or near). At almost 150,000 gross tons, she’s got more volume than a Nimitz-class carrier, though the Nimitz is heavier for obvious reasons. She has nearly twice the volume, in fact, of either of Cunard’s great postwar liners, the Queens Elizabeth and Mary, which were bigger still than the QE2 of our previous crossing. I guess what I’m trying to get at here is BIG.
And the problems begin immediately for big. Southampton is close to the Continent and it has tidal advantages that make it a good port for big ships, but these are almost nullified by a tricky set of shoals leading from Southampton channel into the Solent called The Brambles. On her last visit to Southampton before her recent retirement, QE2 grounded there briefly.
We got underway at about 5:30pm, the ship’s bow thrusters and stern pods churning up the harbor mud as we backed away from the pier, made a 180-degree pivot, and headed out. The ship has a very nice outlook one deck below the bridge, so we and a mob of other folks were jammed onto that to watch her go. (Fortunately dinner thinned them out, so that eventually Barbara and I had the deck much to ourselves.)
After clearing the inner harbor, it was right to The Brambles, marked by a single-lane, S-shaped channel of bouys. Watching the captain and pilot thread this giant ship through there was something. They’d have scarcely cleared the last buoy and set up on new course, when you’d look aft and see the stern swinging rapidly in the opposite direction. A ship handling tutorial.
At about 7:30p, having cleared The Brambles and gotten her safely into resonably open water abeam Portsmouth, Barbara and I relinquished the conn and headed for some dinner of our own in one of the numerous cafeterias, having missed the main meal. We then purchased a pack of playing cards and Barbara taught me a lesson in rummy as we watched England fade away to starboard in one of the public rooms (our cabin and balcony being to port). The sun and the land both disappeared at about 9:30p in the vicinity of Bournmouth.
A Boating We Will Go
Well, kids,
Our time in Old Blighty is coming to an end. We board the Queen Mary II today and we begin our journey back to the states. They mention internet service on board, but I don’t know how much they charge, so I don’t know when you will hear from us next. We land in New York on 30 June and if LaGuardia has free internet service, you will definately hear from us then. Otherwise it may be after Aug. 3.
July 23, 2009
And So It Ends—with Laundry
Talking with our latest landlady this morning, we mentioned our Austen adventures of the past several days. She said that the locals call the fanatics “Janeites,” while another guest mentioned that yesterday she had visited the house in Winchester where Austen died. That house is a private residence and the owners have posted a sign saying “this is a private residence,” which, reported the guest, makes it much easier for the Janeites to find.
Well here we are on the last day of our great circuit of Great Britain. To commemorate the occasion we did laundry. Having partially satisfied that necessity, we headed for lunch. (I misapplied the soap, leaving soap stains on all my shirts. Guess I’ll redo them in the ship’s laundry.) After lunch we visited the town flour mill.
The Doomsday Book of 1086 lists a mill in the town, and a water mill of one kind or another operated until World War I, when it was run out of business by modern rolling mills. The mill, slated to be torn down, was rescued by local benefactors who donated it to the National Trust. In the past decade the Trust has undertaken an extensive restoration, and in 2007 the mill ground grain for the first time in about ninety years. It wasn’t grinding grain today, but the mill race raced, the water wheel spun, and the main gears turned, which was fun.
After that we bought some takeaway salads from the supermarket, headed back to our room, and (I mostly) wasted the evening watching our last British television—news and quiz shows. Tomorrow morning we’ll ride the train down to Southampton for about an hour, then board the ship after 1pm. I don’t know what the internet availability will be, but we’ll try to get off a post or two from the deep blue.
July 22, 2009
Jane and a Train
This morning we did the distaff D-Day tour as I, three other guys, and a hundred women landed in force at Chawton, Hampshire, and overran the Jane Austen house museum. The women were organized into two platoons: Elderly Englishwomen and American college students. A few of the latter were too cool to be there, but most were into it.
The sum of my experience of Jane Austen’s works is the Olivier/Garson version of Pride and Prejudice (which I enjoyed), but having dragged Barbara around France for three days to stare into gun emplacements and bomb crators, simple fairness suggested the visit to Chawton. It was a visit well worth making.
Austen, born in 1775, lived with her family in London, Bath, and Southampton, before moving into the house in Chawton on 5 July 1809 (we made the bicentennial year and month, if not the day). Austen had already offered her first novel to a publisher, but did most of her significant writing on her great novels at a small table in the kitchen of this house between 1809 and her death in 1817, probably from either Addison’s disease or lymphoma, aged 41.
Her clan was fairly well connected (they lived in the Chawton house, part of a relative’s estate, rent-free for life) and successful (two of her brothers became admirals in the royal navy). All of them, save Jane, were long-lived, into their seventies and beyond.
As a representative of the genus house museum, the Jane Austen house did well. They had some original stuff exposed to sunlight; not so good. In terms of interpretation, however, they did well, using the house and its artifacts effectively to tell the story of Austen and her family. An interesting morning. Barbara extracted goodies from their gift shop to about the same degree that I did at the Brunel museum. In her case a book bag, a box set of the collected works, and a nice trophy refrigerator magnet.
We had one last steam adventure heading back to Winchester from Chawton, the Mid Hants Railway, which we rode from Alton to Alresford. While waiting for the train, I did a little shopping of my own. I picked up a booklet of sixty railroad track plans from the Alton hobby shop for under two pounds. The British, starved for space, are full of smart modeling ideas. Even if you don’t use their plans per se, you can always pick up a few pointers.
Further up the street at the local used bookstore, I picked up “Aunts Are Not Gentlemen,” a Jeeves and Wooster, for the voyage. In truth I should do my duty on the crossing and read a Revolutionary War monograph that I’ve assigned for this fall. And I probably will, but if the author gets all ernest and paradigmatical, I have Wodehouse to defend me.
So onto the Mid Hants Railway, also called the Watercress Line. Completed in 1865, part of this railroad extended ten miles from Alton to Alresford, near Winchester. The line greatly improved delivery of the area’s most important product to the London market—watercress. Yes, watercress, the leafy plant used in salads.
The line survived, merged into various larger roads, until British Rail closed it in 1973. Whereupon enthusiasts purchased and rehabilitated this section, reopening it as a heritage steam railroad in 1985. The line surmounts a 500-foot pass. The section from Alton to the pass is one of those tunnels of trees, but after the summit it opens up (insofar as British country opens up) into grain fields and farm country. Kind of a straight shot, so not much opportunity for photos, but a fun ride.
Once returned to Winchester, we had dinner at an Indian restaurant called Gandi’s. I managed to order something pleasant and not burn my face off, so a nice way to end the day.
