David: A Few General Remarks, Post-Voyage

Our second full day home, and we are still not recovered from the shift on body clocks: Carole tends to droop a lot mid-afternoon, although she tends to get a second wind in the evening, so we don't go to bed any earlier, but we wake up several times in the wee hours of the morning and have to force ourselves to go back to sleep.

We had a joyous reunion with our pets this morning. Pixie, who was terrified about having anybody other than the two of us touch or hold her, apparently took to Mary the pet handler within a day and a half, and by the time we got back to the States was spinning in circles in her company and kissing her, and barking furiously if Mary left the room. But she was overjoyed to see us again and took quite a few minutes to stop hyperventilating during the car ride home.

It will take me some time to gather up and organize the many slips and sheets of paper on which I took notes during this trip, about everything from snatches of funny overheard conversations and Giles Ramsay's lectures on the history of theater, to specific paintings we photographed in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Not to mention the roughly 700 photographs we shot on the trip! (Carole formatted a couple from the New York City leg -- of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and us in Central Park -- which went up on her Facebook page, so if you're an FB friend of her or me [I've linked to it from mine] you can look at them there. If you're not an FB friend of ours, then why aren't you?

I can, and may well, write essays on our odd hotel in London, and the varieties of comfort facilities we encountered along the trip (with a memory or two of similarly posh or spartan arrangements on past travels overseas).

For the moment, just a few general comments, now that it's over.

The cruise on the Queen Mary 2 was everything we could have hoped for, and more. I'll admit that up front I was fairly blase about that part: it was Carole's lifelong dream, and she found a theater-history and current shows package that appealed to me. Going in, I just sort of assumed the QM2 was a cruise ship rather like several others, maybe dozens, on the ocean. It was probably several decades old, and a copy of the original Queen Mary.

I would have been wrong on all counts. The skilled crew, from the commodore to the engineers, carefully stressed that this ship was an "ocean liner," as distinguished from a "cruise ship." The former can and does make direct trips across the Atlantic at all times of the year, in fair weather and foul, while the latter tend to linger in the warmer climes, and make long stopovers in exotic ports. The former is also officially empowered to carry Her Majesty's mail across the ocean, and therefore entitled to the designation RMS (Royal Mail Ship).

The QM2 is only five years old; she is the longest, tallest, and broadest passenger vessel ever launched (from the legendary shipbuilding yard at Alstom Chantiers de l'Atlantique, near St.-Nazaire, France). She is too wide to fit through the Panama Canal, yet her draft is only 32 feet -- meaning she can travel in shallower water than the original Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, which drafted at 42 feet and therefore sometimes had to wait for flood tide to dock in New York or Southampton. At 203 above the waterline, the QM2 enables passengers to look the Statue of Liberty directly in the eye.

Just about the only thing we could not say was superlative and perfection about the RM2 was the coffee. I rather regret that I didn't take a chance to stop at one of the dozens upon dozens of Starbucks outlets I saw in London -- they really are nearly as common and densely situated there as in Portland! -- to see whether the coffee drinks seemed comparable . . . because coffee under any other circumstances was pretty mediocre. It ranged from the truly awful (out of the automatic dispenser machines aboard the ship) to the barely acceptable (in the Queen Mary 2 dining room and our hotel). The Brits really don't know from coffee!

We came away from our visit to Hampton Court -- and to a lesser extent, to the London museums and theaters -- with a pressing desire to improve our knowledge of English history. So many fascinating personalities I'd certainly heard of but really need to know more about: Oliver Cromwell, Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, William the Conqueror, David Garrick, Harold Pinter, and on and on.

Also, as Carole recalled this morning, not once throughout the whole trip did anyone offer us an "English muffin" or a crumpet.