The first 1500 miles on a boat across the North Atlantic
Home: Queen Mary 2

Last night, I wanted to check something about our cruise, so I entered my info (you get a “record locator” code, just like for a flight), and the website returned “Sorry, your ship has already departed.” WTF?!? Did I mess up the dates?!?

After a few seconds of panic, I told myself that I had checked the date a million times, I had an email saying the sailing was tomorrow, and then I read some fine-print on the form that says that your booking information is “available until the day before you sail.” (emphasis added by me, not them!) Uh, not only is that stupid, but if you’re going to be stupid like that, you should really return a less-stupid message than “your ship has sailed”!! So I was soon back up to a 99% confidence that our ship was leaving when I expected it to, but it was a relief to remove that 1% of freshly-induced doubt the next morning when Ed walked out onto his balcony and announced “Oh, there’s your ship!”

Our assigned boarding time was 2:45pm. With a couple thousand people needing to stream through the literally one door onto the ship, they understandably try to space us out. Luckily, Ed had no particular plans, so was happy to let us keep our home-base while we ran more errands (getting some New York bagel breakfast sandwiches, filling the remainder of one prescription, dropping an Amazon return), and then led us out on a nice 9-mile bike tour to the 2-miles-away cruise terminal, showing us much of the Brooklyn waterfront and letting us grab a pastrami sandwich lunch from under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Completing his excellent service, Ed routed us right to the pedestrian/bike entrance to the cruise terminal (a bit south of the vehicle entrance) and sent us on our way. Cunard allows you to check as many bags as you like (which are later delivered to your room), but since our plan was to wheel our bikes to our room (which we wouldn’t be able to “check”), we just kept everything as “carry ons”. In retrospect, maybe it would have been easier to check some bags, but not knowing how the process would work, it felt best to just keep everything together.

We rolled into the terminal building, a worker greeted us and asked if we had our boarding passes printed, which we didn’t, his handheld machine made quick work of that. Then we flashed passports and boarding passes to the guy gating the entrance to the line, and began the process of snaking back and forth to the baggage screening. No one (except fellow passengers) looked even slightly-strangely at our bikes. The actual scan of our documents was just before the X-ray machines, mirroring airport security. We had to go to a specific detector that we’d be able to roll our bikes around, and that’s where we had to unload every bag and put it on the X-ray conveyor.

At that point, one or two of the workers expressed some frustration, as we were taking up a lot of space, but not anywhere near the point of stopping us. In fact, the X-ray showed them something in one of my bags that they wanted to check out, and as they were tentatively looking inside, another worker said “c’mon, we gotta move this along!” and the inspector just said “eh, you’re good” and sent us on our way.

The final step was actual check-in, where a line of Cunard employees sat behind a long counter (more like the ticket counter outside security at an airport). Another long line snaked toward them, but here’s where our pain-in-the-ass unintentionally worked to our advantage: one of the annoyed workers (rightly) recognized that snaking our bikes through the tighter set of ropes would suck for both us and everyone else, so he directed us somewhere else, which I think was the priority boarding lane! Rett charmed the default-surly clerk who had to take our photos (something we could have done in advance but didn’t get around to), and she was laughing and cheering us by the time she sent us on our way. No one seemed particularly concerned that we were somewhat ahead of our scheduled 2:45pm arrival, and by jumping past 100 people in line, we might have completed the whole process before we were even supposed to start!

Then it was just some free rolling down echo-y corridors, to an elevator (where most could take the stairs), and a switchbacking ramp to raise us to the 3rd deck of the ship. And we were aboard! Once again, no one looked at all askance at us rolling our bikes across the fancy carpet through the ship’s central atrium. We had a bit of a wait for elevators to take us up to Deck 6, and there was only space for one bike at a time, but soon we were rolling right up to our room.

Cunard requires that bikes must be stored in your room, so that’s part of why we had booked a room with a sheltered balcony, with the hope that we could store the bikes out there. For “normal” luggage, there is quite a bit of closet space, which means that with some disassembly, we possibly could have found a way to slide the bikes into the fairly cavernous space under the bed, but it was nice that we didn’t have to try. Because the Queen Mary 2 was designed as an “ocean liner”, expected to traverse rougher seas than a standard Caribbean “cruise ship”, a significant number its “balconies” (more like covered porches?) are built inside the hull. It’s a more-utilitarian and less-glamorous thing than the open-air balconies on higher decks, but that’s what makes it cheaper, and for us, actually a higher value (i.e., I definitely didn’t want to get “upgraded”!) Plus, as we would soon learn, no one wants to be outside on a crossing of the North Atlantic anyway, so it’s actually kind of funny that they can trick people into paying big bucks for open balconies they’ll barely use.

We did a bit of quick exploring, waved “to” Ed from a couple miles away, and at 5pm our ship set out. The few hours before and after departure probably had more passenger-hours out on-deck than the entire next week. Not only was it the last time we would see land (and the land around New York Harbor is more interesting than most!), it was also the most-comfortable weather (we were lucky to get out ahead of the storm that was going to drop 7-9 inches on the Hudson Valley). Everyone was laid out on the cushioned deck chairs facing the rail, and those cushions would disappear to somewhere by nightfall, never to return again (and many of the chairs were folded up).

Our assigned dinner time was 8:30pm. Cunard likes to keep their ships high-class, so after 6pm, many places (including the Britannia Restaurant, our main dining area) are “Smart Attire”. Which essentially means (for men) pants and collard shirts, though certainly they wouldn’t mind if you wore a tie or a jacket. Since I only own one collared shirt, that was my uniform for the week.

But worse, especially for Rett, is that there are two “gala evenings” during the crossing, where the dress code is upgraded to tie-and-jacket at a minimum, and black-tie preferred. Half of the attraction to this journey for Rett was that it’s the closest opportunity to replicate the voyage of the Titanic (the QM2 literally does the identical Southampton, UK to NYC, USA crossing that the Titanic planned to do), so acting like Rose Dewitt Bukater, or other first-class Titanic passengers, was her dream. But since it would be nearly impossible for me to add a tuxedo (especially the shoes) to my possessions, we would be forced to act like steerage passengers for those nights. As a condition of taking this journey, I made her promise that she wouldn’t pressure/guilt me into finding a way to make the galas happen, because for me, a big part of taking the boat was a reduction in the stress that comes with packing and transporting the bikes for flying; finding a way to manage a tux would just bring all that stress and difficulty back.

So while I was pleased that she kept her promise, I still felt bad that I couldn’t take her out for those gala evenings, or take her back to 1912. For me, I have my memories of her bringing me to the fabulous black-tie holiday parties thrown by her friend, and I feel like anything on this boat would feel artificial and half-assed in comparison, so I was totally fine being “banished” to the buffet restaurant for a couple nights.

For our “normal” fancy dinners, we were seated at a table for 8 with just one other couple, around 80 years old (closer to the average passenger age), from Windsor, UK. Despite the age and personality differences, they were a nice pairing for us, because their son has lived in the US for 20+ years, and they have made frequent trips to visit him. So they had particularly good insights on differences between the US and the UK to share. And they shared them over excellent food. There are dining options that you can “upgrade” to, but with a fresh menu every night, it was hard to imagine how we could have been better fed.

Then after each dinner, it was quickly to bed, because on the Queen Mary 2, each day is only 23 hours long!