Cruises with a difference – the Queen Mary at Long Beach
I have never yet been on any Cruises the nearest I have been to this experience was in the early 1980s. Let me explain my wife and I decided on a touring holiday in the western United States. Freddie Laker had recently started his modestly priced flights, our Travel Agent produced a package of flight, to Los Angeles via Bangor Maine, three weeks car hire first and last night accommodation at hotels near the airport and discount accommodation vouchers with Best Western for about ten nights. We had a wonderful time seeing the Grand Canyon, with a great helicopter trip. San Diego was a truly lovely city. Las Vegas was hot, noisy, glittering and ghastly. Everybody should visit the Redwood forests they are so imposing. Yosemite National Park, has to be seen, we stayed in a sort of canvas hut in the forest. San Francisco, where tiring of Best Western we splashed out on a hotel on Union Square. The trip culminated in a gentle cruise in the car down the California coast, we arrived in Los Angeles a few days before our flight home to do the tourist sites, and booked into the inevitable Best Western.
Queen Mary cruise ship
The following day we decided that an unremitting fare of Best Western left us looking for a change of accommodation. Our guidebook provided it. The Queen Mary, transatlantic liner, troopship, transatlantic liner again and latterly cruise ship was berthed at Long Beach as a floating hotel, museum and convention centre. The advertising promised to recreate Cruises of the past. We called to book, then drove to Long Beach and found our way to the liner; we parked on an enormous car park, which very effectively separated the ship from nearby buildings by a great distance. We checked in and took the tour, which was good, went around the small museum, which was not quite so good. Ate a very good meal took a turn around the deck and found our way to our cabin. I think the night aboard did recreate the atmosphere of long gone Cruises, the cabin we had was wonderful, slightly retro in design and layout and with a porthole that looked out over the sea. The width of the car park made the city seem a long way away, and the ship’s public rooms were just as I had imagined them to be. Quite recently, I was in Amsterdam for work, and booked myself into the Flotel there, this was not a retired liner or cruise ship but a floating hotel designed to make use of unused wharf space near Amsterdam’s main railway station. There was also a floating Chinese restaurant moored nearby, which was very like the floating Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong. Sad to say this was not an experience that evoked long gone great Cruises. The Flotel was just that, a Floating hotel in a convenient location. Not nearly as good as my ‘cruise’ on the Queen Mary.