1.4 mi / 8.0 mph / 30 ft. climbing
Home: CityPark AirBNB

The Queen Mary 2 arrived to Southampton while we slept, so waking up and looking over our balcony rail this morning showed a bunch of ugly port infrastructure, quite a change from a week of seeing nothing but open ocean (also, I could see the large luggage carts stacked with peoples’ checked baggage being forklifted off from a lower deck).

Disembarkation was a chaotic mess, apparently because British immigration has recently changed their policies. Previously, an immigration official has traveled on-board, and the 2000 passengers had their passports gradually checked at scheduled times during the voyage. Now, the immigration officials only board when the ship has docked, so everyone must be processed in one morning. This was only the second time the Queen Mary 2 has landed in the UK under the new policy, and they are clearly still figuring out how to manage it.

Since we were taking all of our own luggage off with us, we were eligible to sign up for “flexible disembarkation”, which sounds like a desirable feature, though it wasn’t clear why. Despite the name, we still had to choose a time, and since we wouldn’t be able to check into our AirBNB until the afternoon, we chose 9:15am, the latest offered time. It seems that if you have checked luggage (and thus, “inflexible” disembarkation), you are assigned some other time. Is that a “better” time, or a “worse” time? Who knows! Only after we had chosen our time did we learn that we would need to vacate our room by 8:30am…and go where with our bikes and all of our bags?! That, and other facts, allowed me to finally glean that earlier times are considered “better”, I guess because most people aren’t staying in Southampton, and want to get on to their next destination ASAP?

The written instructions we received were perfectly uninformative, telling us to visit the Queen’s Room at a non-specific time for processing. Once we get processed, do we need to directly leave the ship, and thus, wheel our loaded bikes in line for the length of the ship? The instructions said “Keep your luggage, and visit the Queen’s Room”. Um, is that “keep your luggage in your room, visit the Queen’s Room, and then return to pick it up”? Or “keep your luggage with you as you go the the Queen’s Room”? If the latter, wouldn’t “take your luggage…” be clearer verbiage? But maybe it’s a British vs. American English thing? We had to call the purser’s office, and found that we would be able to return to our room after processing (as long as processing was done before 8:30am, and who knows if it would be!)

The understandable result of all this uncertainty was everyone rushing to get into line even before the published 7am opening time, the exact opposite of what should have happened. The purser’s office did at least realize that there would be a long line, so it directed people to only use the elevators at the opposite end of the ship from the Queen’s Room, to prevent people from materializing in the middle of the line and pushing against the flow to reach the end. However, the line ended up stretching far beyond even the furthest elevators, finding ad-hoc ways to double back on itself at multiple points. And since zero staff members were at that distant end to provide direction, chaos ensued, with at least one fight nearly breaking out between a 50-year-old man and an 80-year-old woman (the woman was the one in the wrong).

In the end, the line moved really fast; most of the glacial pace at the beginning (which caused the rage-inducing fear that people would be in line for hours and miss their connections/plans/breakfast) seemed to simply be due to the doors not yet opening. Once opened, there were five immigration officers sitting in the Queens Room (an advantage of having them board after the ship docked), and processing only took a few seconds per passenger. We were through by 7:30am, meaning that we still had time to go to the buffet for breakfast before returning to our room to collect our things (and even then, it was clear that our housekeeper had plenty of work to do in already-vacated rooms, so we didn’t really need to be out by 8:30am).

Still, we headed toward the exit with our loaded bikes well before our scheduled-but-flexible(?) 9:15am disembarkation time, got mistakenly shunted into the “people with pets only” line, and allowed to depart with a brief eye-roll. Down a big elevator packed with other passengers (with two doors, so we didn’t have to back out, yay!), and then big signs directed us to Customs. Ugh, I guess we aren’t quite finished. Except…all the desks in the “Customs” room were empty, and we all passed right through.

Huzzah, we’re in the United Kingdom, the 8th country of our nomadacy!

With my TigerEye helmet mirror re-bent to fit on the opposite side of my helmet, we first started on bike/walking paths leaving the port, but then dropped into the road to remember what riding on the left side is like. Our 7 months in New Zealand is now two years in the past, so it didn’t immediately feel perfectly natural, but the adjustment definitely came faster this time. We quickly found a park with a bench to figure out what to do until our AirBNB became available. We’d try a little sight-seeing, but that’s always difficult with the bikes, so we soon settled into another park, only to get a message from our host that our place was ready at 11:13am. Amazing!

Shortly after we’d loaded into our AirBNB (with a million windows overlooking a park), our hostess appeared, distressed that she had forgotten to put some milk in our fridge. Oh my, yes, good thing she remembered, or she would have had a 1-star review coming her way! But seriously, this odd expectation for milk was something we remembered from New Zealand, and I now realized that what I had thought of as a “New Zealand” thing was more likely a “British thing”, simply carried along to New Zealand. And we would quickly discover many more things in that category: power outlets with on/off switches, the electric range with raised metal discs for the burners, wide-mouth toilets that flush with a straight-down deluge rather than a swirl, narrow street sections with signs telling whether our direction or theirs should yield, campsites which are just rectangular lines drawn in a field of grass, and surely many more “oddities” that Britain revoked from our country as the price of our violent revolution.

We were pleased with the variety, quality and prices(!) at the mini-grocery chain half-a-block away, and the big Asda Supermarket we visited later confirmed a significant improvement over South America.

When we were preparing our pile of purchased vegetables for roasting, I was suddenly struck by how the task felt like a return to “normal life”. Like, it’s sort of backwards that our month-long returns to our childhood homes were the “vacation”, and now, making roasted vegetables in a strange AirBNB in a foreign country is what feels like a return to a comfortable routine. It’s the first time I’ve felt anything like that, so I initially thought it might have just been in contrast to the constant “restaurant” eating from the week on the ship. But no, I think it’s really just a reflection of how long we have been living this nomadic life. Previously, cooking a dinner in a strange kitchen always felt like something we’re doing “while we’re traveling”, but now, nearly 5 years in, maybe a switch has flipped, and my brain has accepted that “while we’re traveling” is “normal life”, and it expects it to continue for the foreseeable future.

Days 2-3

The pressure our fellow cruise passengers felt to exit Southampton, along with our English dinner partners’ view that there wasn’t much of value in the port town, must be due to a default assumption that it’s nothing more than a waypoint through which they must pass before they get to go where they actually want to be, or because they are so inured to the history dripping from English cities that only our American eyes would notice anything special here.

From pubs in buildings several hundred years old, to the well-preserved city walls hundreds of years older than that, it’s a striking reminder that we’ve spent the last 5 years of “world travel” entirely focused on the New World. The Old World of Europe will be an entirely different experience!