Saturday, April 30 – The Queen Mary II
Our Granddaughter, Sara drove us to the airport playing the theme from the movie Titanic, as if we weren’t already nervous enough, and then when she dropped us off she hugged us more than usual saying “What if I never see you again?” I thought “We who are about to die salute you . . .”
She was still in her pajama bottoms with a sweatshirt hoodie top. Such attire is now common everywhere, but it reminded me of what trips to the airport were like when I was a child. Suits and ties for men and Sunday dresses for the ladies were de rigeur because Airports were really special then. Our whole family used to visit the Savannah airport periodically just to watch the planes take off and land, and we’d dream about flying somewhere, someday. Now it’s pajama bottoms and sweatshirts and no visiting the gate if you don’t have a ticket. Even at The Bluegrass “International” Airport at 11 in the morning.
At the bar we had our ‘settle-me-down’ wine and shared an appetizer of chicken tenders with bleu cheese and honey mustard dipping sauces. The chicken was coated with panko crumbs and the dipping sauces were surprisingly good. Lots of bleu cheese chunks and spicy honey mustard. Much better than I expected and a precursor to the epicurean delights in store for us.
Our flight wasn’t until 1pm so we had a long uneventful wait in the gate area. Uneventful, except for dropping a full pack of tic tacs who immediately scattered as far and wide as possible, and hid under as many chairs as they could reach before I could count to ten and shout “Here I come, ready or not!” So there we were on our hands and knees in the Bluegrass International Airport trying to round them all up. Then we dumped them all in the trash (that’s probably why they hid in the first place) and unbeknownst to us a nice young man wearing a UK Soccer sweatshirt went to a little hole-in-the-wall convenience store on the concourse and bought Georgia a replacement pack. How very nice of him. There are a nice crop of student athletes nowadays.
I noticed that he was wearing shorts and had tattooed a sentence of some sort around his thigh, partially hidden by his shorts. I have no idea what it said but it’s fun to speculate. What sentence would a handsome young man tattoo around his upper thigh? Hope it’s something he still feels comfortable with in 20 or 30 years. I remember that my dad had an old girlfriend’s name tattooed on his chest before he met my mom. When they met he took a knife and scraped the name away. At the beach the scars were still visible 40 years later. I suppose it’s easier to erase tattoos now with lasers but I doubt it’s painless. Me, I wondered if I should turn him in to the TSA. After all they kept warning us every few minutes “Do not accept any packages (or tic tacs?) from someone you do not know; report them to the nearest law enforcement officer immediately!” Had we obeyed I’m sure this miscreant would have been thrown under the jail. Exploding tic tacs? Oh the humanity! This kind of dastardly malicious kindness simply cannot be tolerated in today’s world. But happily for us, this would not be the last time that a “nice young man” looked out for us on this trip.
Our seats on the plane were just behind first class with wonderful leg-room and a few free Scotch-on-the-rocks. I guess because we were close to the special people onboard the plane some of their luster rubbed off on us.
The Charlotte airport was huge. Much bigger than we expected, and it did take at least 10 minutes to walk from the E Concourse to B. The flight from Charlotte to LaGuardia was on a huge plane though there were a few empty seats. Like the one next to Georgia. But I didn’t get a free scotch and I wasn’t going to pay 9$ for one either! So I had to fly “unsettled.” We called the Springhill Suites when we arrived and they sent a small bus for us. Another couple, Scott and Debbie were waiting as well. “You going on a boat tomorrow?” she asked. “Aye, Aye,” we said, so right away we met some other “Queen Maryites.”
Our room at the Springhill was nice, with its own little living-room area and two TVs. Hungry, we walked around our Queens neighborhood looking for supper. That was eye-opening. Thought we were in an Italian area so looked for a good pizza joint or Italian restaurant but the one we found had obviously changed hands and been turned into a little tienda market with a couple of cold cheese pizzas and lots of Mexican food. None of it looked as good as the canopy-covered taco-stand offerings we passed on the sidewalk. So we went back and got four little soft steak tacos with all the fixings. Yummy! but I’m really glad we ate the same thing. Our breath would have singed each other’s eyebrows otherwise. So then off to bed dreaming of the bounding main tomorrow.
Sunday, May 1
I woke up at 4:30 for my normal call of nature and couldn’t go back to sleep. It was already getting light outside. New York City is farther east than Lexington of course. I read the gossip-news on-line and did my Wordle and Quordle then fidgeted enough to wake up Georgia. Got a shower and fetched coffee from downstairs and had a breakfast of waffles, oatmeal, and a boiled egg. Might as well start training for our over-eating extravaganza. Saw Debbie and Scott. She said she’d seen photos of the Queen Mary docking, so knew it’d arrived in New York city. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might not be there. I guess it had to come from somewhere else too.
We had asked to be ferried to the ship from the Airport. That was supposed to happen at 11am. So we’d asked the hotel shuttle to carry us back to the airport at 10. Nervous Nelly that I am we actually caught the hotel shuttle at 9:30. Given what happened, we could have just waited until after lunch—or better yet we could have just started walking toward the docks in lower Manhattan pulling the suitcases behind us and gotten there sooner than we did on our various shuttles. The New York city-streets were full of bikes and joggers for the 5-boroughs bike race. We saw them clearly as we were inching along Interstate 878, or as we called it “The Queens Expressway Parking Lot.”
But I get ahead of myself.
As I said, we caught the hotel shuttle to the airport about 10 and arrived at the LaGuardia Welcome Center at 10:15. We saw two other Maryites there. We all had the same sort of luggage tag—supplied by Cunard so that our bags could be delivered directly to our rooms when we got on board. Is that cool or what? We started schmoozing and getting to know each other. Joellen and Ken were from Tupelo Mississippi. “Yes, indeed. It is a small world.” They were “Crossing” again, not cruising, which only “carnivalesque” boats do, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary two years late. Ken seems to have Parkinson’s or some other degenerative disease. He said he’s retired from financing and investments but really misses his work. He loved his coworkers and his customers and misses the day-to-day interaction. He was not the only neurologically handicapped person we were going to see on the ship.
The time passed quickly and soon it was 11am. No shuttle. But now there were 15 or 20 of us waiting to board. The airport rep said that the shuttle was supposed to come sometime between 11 and 12, “there was some sort of bike race going on.” So we settled down and schmoozed some more. About 11:30 Georgia got worried and called Cunard. It took a while to get the agent to understand the issue. She said she would check, and after a long hold came back to say that the bus was on its way. We waited inside the terminal another 10-15 minutes then went out to the curb to await the imminent arrival of the shuttle bus.
After another 10 or 15 minutes, Georgia said she knew our names were supposed to be checked off some list or other, so went back in, leaving me outside with the bags in case they did this “checking-off” outside. We always cover all the bases, doncha know? After another 15 or 20 minutes neither of us got checked-off. Twelve o’clock came and went. No shuttle. But several more couples had arrived from somewhere. It was clear that our group now was not going to fit on the typical little 10-15 person shuttle-bus we were seeing. Afraid of being left, people started jockeying for a position close to the curb. More phone calls to Cunard from others in the group. The word was that the shuttle was on its way but some sort of bike race had the city streets snarled.
Twelve-thirty came and went. The Natives were definitely getting restless. One o’clock came and went. I know the telephone agents were sick of hearing from each of us individually. Oh, the rumors, oh the grumbles. There is no more naturally “entitled” group of people than elderly, rich, white, toutist-folk—Cunard’s target audience.
And then Halleluiah! At 1:20 a large blue bus arrived to load us up. Our poor eastern-european driver was left to load several tons of baggage all by himself. The amount of luggage our little entitled group brought was staggering. But, who cares? We were on the bus and on our way from Queens to lower Manhattan, about 3 miles away, at 1:30. Piece of cake!
Almost immediately we ran into trouble. Very slow traffic and many irritated drivers switching back and forth trying to find a lane that was moving faster than the one they were in. Even the shoulder was turned into another ‘lane.’ And as we crawled along we saw police cars forbidding anyone from driving along perfectly empty surface streets. In desperation cars were even backing down entrance ramps trying to get out of this log-jam. But the police cars stationed there stopped them, so the jam just got bigger. Nothing worked. No relief. We crawled along at the speed of a crippled man on a walker. Bike race. Hah. I Saw a kid peddling his little training-wheeled bike down the centerline of the empty street below two or three times faster than we were traveling.
And so the first hour passed on the bus. But that was ok. We had until 4pm to check in at the pier and now it was only 2pm. And then it was 3pm and we had only moved another half mile. We started passing the various cars who had run out of gas and were now blocking the (ho ho) expressway.
Just another 30 minutes or so and we’d make it onto the island of Manhattan. Then we would just need to get down close to the docks. But we were still crawling. Then miraculously the traffic started to clear. No one cheered for fear it would jinx us—but we heard that the race was over at 4pm and the traffic was starting to break up. In the distance we could just see the Queen towering regally over the surrounding warehouses—and then mirabile dictu, we were there beside her—4pm on the dot.
Off the bus, the dock-workers said to leave the luggage—it would be delivered to our rooms, but lots of the people were now gun-shy. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” So they waited to grab their wheelie-bags and steamer trunks planning to drag them along like over-weight security blankets. Not me. I was glad to have someone else take charge of them.
In “Security” we were asked to show our boarding pass, our passport, our shot record, and our proof of a negative Covid test within the past 48 hours. And now, God knows how, our numbers seemed to have swelled again. Imagine one hundred or so elderly, infirm, technology-challenged, entitled tourists trying to find their electronic records: “It’s not my phone, sir. I don’t know where the PDF screenshot of your vaccination status is to be found.” “Excuse me, sir, NO! you can’t just skip this step!” And then we are ushered through the bag-check—very similar to all the bag-checks at all the airports of the world. Same x-ray machines; same befuddled travelers showing their passports and boarding passes again. Then shepherded through another slow-moving line snaking towards a counter with 8-10 agents. At 4:30 we had only made it about half-way to nirvana. At 5pm on the dot we made it to the head of the line and showed the agent our boarding pass, passport, shot record, and our proof of a negative Covid test within the past 48 hours yet again.
The agent then took our photo and compared it to the photo on our passport, then affixed the photo to our room key-card (that we would also use for all on-board purchases) and pointed us towards a mysterious nearby doorway. . . .
To be continued
Our Granddaughter, Sara drove us to the airport playing the theme from the movie Titanic, as if we weren’t already nervous enough, and then when she dropped us off she hugged us more than usual saying “What if I never see you again?” I thought “We who are about to die salute you . . .”
She was still in her pajama bottoms with a sweatshirt hoodie top. Such attire is now common everywhere, but it reminded me of what trips to the airport were like when I was a child. Suits and ties for men and Sunday dresses for the ladies were de rigeur because Airports were really special then. Our whole family used to visit the Savannah airport periodically just to watch the planes take off and land, and we’d dream about flying somewhere, someday. Now it’s pajama bottoms and sweatshirts and no visiting the gate if you don’t have a ticket. Even at The Bluegrass “International” Airport at 11 in the morning.
At the bar we had our ‘settle-me-down’ wine and shared an appetizer of chicken tenders with bleu cheese and honey mustard dipping sauces. The chicken was coated with panko crumbs and the dipping sauces were surprisingly good. Lots of bleu cheese chunks and spicy honey mustard. Much better than I expected and a precursor to the epicurean delights in store for us.
Our flight wasn’t until 1pm so we had a long uneventful wait in the gate area. Uneventful, except for dropping a full pack of tic tacs who immediately scattered as far and wide as possible, and hid under as many chairs as they could reach before I could count to ten and shout “Here I come, ready or not!” So there we were on our hands and knees in the Bluegrass International Airport trying to round them all up. Then we dumped them all in the trash (that’s probably why they hid in the first place) and unbeknownst to us a nice young man wearing a UK Soccer sweatshirt went to a little hole-in-the-wall convenience store on the concourse and bought Georgia a replacement pack. How very nice of him. There are a nice crop of student athletes nowadays.
I noticed that he was wearing shorts and had tattooed a sentence of some sort around his thigh, partially hidden by his shorts. I have no idea what it said but it’s fun to speculate. What sentence would a handsome young man tattoo around his upper thigh? Hope it’s something he still feels comfortable with in 20 or 30 years. I remember that my dad had an old girlfriend’s name tattooed on his chest before he met my mom. When they met he took a knife and scraped the name away. At the beach the scars were still visible 40 years later. I suppose it’s easier to erase tattoos now with lasers but I doubt it’s painless. Me, I wondered if I should turn him in to the TSA. After all they kept warning us every few minutes “Do not accept any packages (or tic tacs?) from someone you do not know; report them to the nearest law enforcement officer immediately!” Had we obeyed I’m sure this miscreant would have been thrown under the jail. Exploding tic tacs? Oh the humanity! This kind of dastardly malicious kindness simply cannot be tolerated in today’s world. But happily for us, this would not be the last time that a “nice young man” looked out for us on this trip.
Our seats on the plane were just behind first class with wonderful leg-room and a few free Scotch-on-the-rocks. I guess because we were close to the special people onboard the plane some of their luster rubbed off on us.
The Charlotte airport was huge. Much bigger than we expected, and it did take at least 10 minutes to walk from the E Concourse to B. The flight from Charlotte to LaGuardia was on a huge plane though there were a few empty seats. Like the one next to Georgia. But I didn’t get a free scotch and I wasn’t going to pay 9$ for one either! So I had to fly “unsettled.” We called the Springhill Suites when we arrived and they sent a small bus for us. Another couple, Scott and Debbie were waiting as well. “You going on a boat tomorrow?” she asked. “Aye, Aye,” we said, so right away we met some other “Queen Maryites.”
Our room at the Springhill was nice, with its own little living-room area and two TVs. Hungry, we walked around our Queens neighborhood looking for supper. That was eye-opening. Thought we were in an Italian area so looked for a good pizza joint or Italian restaurant but the one we found had obviously changed hands and been turned into a little tienda market with a couple of cold cheese pizzas and lots of Mexican food. None of it looked as good as the canopy-covered taco-stand offerings we passed on the sidewalk. So we went back and got four little soft steak tacos with all the fixings. Yummy! but I’m really glad we ate the same thing. Our breath would have singed each other’s eyebrows otherwise. So then off to bed dreaming of the bounding main tomorrow.
Sunday, May 1
I woke up at 4:30 for my normal call of nature and couldn’t go back to sleep. It was already getting light outside. New York City is farther east than Lexington of course. I read the gossip-news on-line and did my Wordle and Quordle then fidgeted enough to wake up Georgia. Got a shower and fetched coffee from downstairs and had a breakfast of waffles, oatmeal, and a boiled egg. Might as well start training for our over-eating extravaganza. Saw Debbie and Scott. She said she’d seen photos of the Queen Mary docking, so knew it’d arrived in New York city. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might not be there. I guess it had to come from somewhere else too.
We had asked to be ferried to the ship from the Airport. That was supposed to happen at 11am. So we’d asked the hotel shuttle to carry us back to the airport at 10. Nervous Nelly that I am we actually caught the hotel shuttle at 9:30. Given what happened, we could have just waited until after lunch—or better yet we could have just started walking toward the docks in lower Manhattan pulling the suitcases behind us and gotten there sooner than we did on our various shuttles. The New York city-streets were full of bikes and joggers for the 5-boroughs bike race. We saw them clearly as we were inching along Interstate 878, or as we called it “The Queens Expressway Parking Lot.”
But I get ahead of myself.
As I said, we caught the hotel shuttle to the airport about 10 and arrived at the LaGuardia Welcome Center at 10:15. We saw two other Maryites there. We all had the same sort of luggage tag—supplied by Cunard so that our bags could be delivered directly to our rooms when we got on board. Is that cool or what? We started schmoozing and getting to know each other. Joellen and Ken were from Tupelo Mississippi. “Yes, indeed. It is a small world.” They were “Crossing” again, not cruising, which only “carnivalesque” boats do, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary two years late. Ken seems to have Parkinson’s or some other degenerative disease. He said he’s retired from financing and investments but really misses his work. He loved his coworkers and his customers and misses the day-to-day interaction. He was not the only neurologically handicapped person we were going to see on the ship.
The time passed quickly and soon it was 11am. No shuttle. But now there were 15 or 20 of us waiting to board. The airport rep said that the shuttle was supposed to come sometime between 11 and 12, “there was some sort of bike race going on.” So we settled down and schmoozed some more. About 11:30 Georgia got worried and called Cunard. It took a while to get the agent to understand the issue. She said she would check, and after a long hold came back to say that the bus was on its way. We waited inside the terminal another 10-15 minutes then went out to the curb to await the imminent arrival of the shuttle bus.
After another 10 or 15 minutes, Georgia said she knew our names were supposed to be checked off some list or other, so went back in, leaving me outside with the bags in case they did this “checking-off” outside. We always cover all the bases, doncha know? After another 15 or 20 minutes neither of us got checked-off. Twelve o’clock came and went. No shuttle. But several more couples had arrived from somewhere. It was clear that our group now was not going to fit on the typical little 10-15 person shuttle-bus we were seeing. Afraid of being left, people started jockeying for a position close to the curb. More phone calls to Cunard from others in the group. The word was that the shuttle was on its way but some sort of bike race had the city streets snarled.
Twelve-thirty came and went. The Natives were definitely getting restless. One o’clock came and went. I know the telephone agents were sick of hearing from each of us individually. Oh, the rumors, oh the grumbles. There is no more naturally “entitled” group of people than elderly, rich, white, toutist-folk—Cunard’s target audience.
And then Halleluiah! At 1:20 a large blue bus arrived to load us up. Our poor eastern-european driver was left to load several tons of baggage all by himself. The amount of luggage our little entitled group brought was staggering. But, who cares? We were on the bus and on our way from Queens to lower Manhattan, about 3 miles away, at 1:30. Piece of cake!
Almost immediately we ran into trouble. Very slow traffic and many irritated drivers switching back and forth trying to find a lane that was moving faster than the one they were in. Even the shoulder was turned into another ‘lane.’ And as we crawled along we saw police cars forbidding anyone from driving along perfectly empty surface streets. In desperation cars were even backing down entrance ramps trying to get out of this log-jam. But the police cars stationed there stopped them, so the jam just got bigger. Nothing worked. No relief. We crawled along at the speed of a crippled man on a walker. Bike race. Hah. I Saw a kid peddling his little training-wheeled bike down the centerline of the empty street below two or three times faster than we were traveling.
And so the first hour passed on the bus. But that was ok. We had until 4pm to check in at the pier and now it was only 2pm. And then it was 3pm and we had only moved another half mile. We started passing the various cars who had run out of gas and were now blocking the (ho ho) expressway.
Just another 30 minutes or so and we’d make it onto the island of Manhattan. Then we would just need to get down close to the docks. But we were still crawling. Then miraculously the traffic started to clear. No one cheered for fear it would jinx us—but we heard that the race was over at 4pm and the traffic was starting to break up. In the distance we could just see the Queen towering regally over the surrounding warehouses—and then mirabile dictu, we were there beside her—4pm on the dot.
Off the bus, the dock-workers said to leave the luggage—it would be delivered to our rooms, but lots of the people were now gun-shy. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” So they waited to grab their wheelie-bags and steamer trunks planning to drag them along like over-weight security blankets. Not me. I was glad to have someone else take charge of them.
In “Security” we were asked to show our boarding pass, our passport, our shot record, and our proof of a negative Covid test within the past 48 hours. And now, God knows how, our numbers seemed to have swelled again. Imagine one hundred or so elderly, infirm, technology-challenged, entitled tourists trying to find their electronic records: “It’s not my phone, sir. I don’t know where the PDF screenshot of your vaccination status is to be found.” “Excuse me, sir, NO! you can’t just skip this step!” And then we are ushered through the bag-check—very similar to all the bag-checks at all the airports of the world. Same x-ray machines; same befuddled travelers showing their passports and boarding passes again. Then shepherded through another slow-moving line snaking towards a counter with 8-10 agents. At 4:30 we had only made it about half-way to nirvana. At 5pm on the dot we made it to the head of the line and showed the agent our boarding pass, passport, shot record, and our proof of a negative Covid test within the past 48 hours yet again.
The agent then took our photo and compared it to the photo on our passport, then affixed the photo to our room key-card (that we would also use for all on-board purchases) and pointed us towards a mysterious nearby doorway. . . .
To be continued
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