First Report From The Queen Mary

Sunrise on the Queen Mary 2

Ever since we booked our 2014 trip home from Europe on the Queen Mary 2, we’ve been thinking of writing a blog about how travelers could think of transatlantic cruises not just as vacations at sea but as intercontinental transportation. We’ve taken to calling it the “ocean liner” option. After all, our trip on the Queen Mary 2 will wind up costing just a bit more than the 1-way coach airfare we would have had to purchase but way less than the cost of traveling business class on the very same flight. If we had not splurged a bit for a cabin with a balcony, the cost of taking the Queen Mary 2 home might actually have been less than that coach airfare ticket.

But a transatlantic crossing, unless it is the centerpiece of a vacation, seems anachronistic to our culture of immediacy. If the point is to get to Europe, or to get to North America, wouldn’t you want to get there as quickly as possible? The difference, of course, can be found in that travel for us is no longer about vacations and business trips. Travel is our lifestyle, and we plan that to be the case for the coming years while we’re still “young” (which is relative, we know).

As I write this, I’m sitting in the library of the Queen Mary 2, looking out the front window over the bow and open ocean. We are on day four of six full-days at sea, meaning we are more than halfway there. We’ve changed time zones twice, setting the clocks back to gain an hour, and we’ve got three more changes to make over the remaining three nights. With long, lazy days, that makes this return from Europe infinitely more relaxed: there’ll be no jet lag when we set foot in New York in a few more days. Instead, we’ll have to work on getting our “land legs” back.

Walking about, mingling and chatting with people, observing and overhearing, we’ve realized that thinking of transatlantic crossings as transportation shouldn’t have been such a revelation to us. We have Internet access, and every day we see people working. We’ve overheard the unmistakable musical chirps of people calling and connecting on Skype and FaceTime, connecting not only with family but also checking in with the office. We have, ourselves, managed to get some work done amidst the dining, dancing, relaxing by the indoor pool, and generally enjoying our trip home in complete contrast to the hurried rush through the airport and slingshot through the skies that a flight home would have been.

We expected the North Atlantic in December to be rough. And it has been, topping out the scales according to the captain’s announcements. Even though the Queen Mary 2 is one of the largest cruise ships in the world, you still feel that rocking and rolling, and if you’re susceptible to sea sickness, you better have a ready supply of Dramamine. But still, that rocking and rolling is not as bad as we had feared. Except, that is, when you’re dancing: foxtrot, waltz, and swing take on a whole new dynamic when the ballroom is moving beneath your feet.

I’ll blog more in coming weeks on specific things we did while on the Queen Mary 2 and keep this, our initial report, just to an appetite-whetting overview. Suffice it to say this may actually become our preferred way to get back and forth to Europe (not just an option) for these “slow”, months-long adventures we plan to make the cornerstone of our travel lifestyle. But we have learned one important lesson: with as little time as we’ve spent in our cabin, and even less time on our balcony, it seems a completely extravagant splurge to have sprung for a balcony room to begin with. Balconies, it seems, are better ideas for vacation cruises in warmer climates. On future crossings, we’ll just go for a nice inner cabin, making the ocean liner option about the same price as 1-way coach airfare. But included are six days of great food, dancing, relaxing by the pool, lectures, catching up on reading and writing, and arriving feeling great.