Last Day and Final Notes – Day Six on the QM2

On the morning of the last day on the QM2 I finally got up early enough to have breakfast. Enjoyed English breakfast sausage and black pudding. After which we enjoyed our final lecture by Bill Miller.

The last couple of days were fairly calm, sea wise. Just the occasional roll and shuddering of the stabilizers. However, there there wasn’t much time spent outside.

The most time I spent outside was on the first day, leaving New York, and the final morning as we arrived in Southampton. There really isn’t any playing of shuffleboard on deck 12 when you flying across the North Atlantic at 26 knots.

I’m guessing that the pool and shuffleboard decks are really only used during cruises, when your travelling slower or stopped, and in warmer climates.

In that regard, there was one thing that I did wonder about. Occasionally, I would walk by one of the outside staterooms with a balcony and hear a tornado like noise coming from behind the door and wondered if the cabin steward had accidently left the door open and now all of there papers were flying around like a tornado.

One of the great things on the ship was sitting down at a table and meeting whoever might join you. One day at afternoon tea, dad and I met a couple from Northern Virginia.

In the Commodore Club, I usually took a table with three chairs and inevitably some couple would join me. There were the couple from Naples, FL who were in broadcasting, owning several radio station. There was the English couple who were in property and as far as I could tell spent there entire lives on holiday. They’d been an another cruise before the QM2 crossing, were going to spend a few days at home putting the furniture back into there house after having work done on it, and were then moving to Spain because they liked it better than the UK. They seemed to have a dim view of North Yorkshire. There was the couple who worked in philanthropy, who I actually dared to discuss politics with.

Then there was the Liverpudlian I met in G32 who’d visited the John Lennon memorial in NYC, only to be asked by people to tell them about The Beatles as soon as they learned where he was from.

Since I was talking to an Englishman, and I’d had a few drinks by then, The accent came back a bit. And at some point we ended up talking about accents. He was a long distance (by UK standards) lorry driver and would travel through Yorkshire, up into Scotland and back again, and found he would pick up bits and pieces of the various accents while he was travelling. So at one point asked my an interesting question. What accent do I think in? The answer is, whatever accent I’m speaking in.

Anyone who knows me knows that I really do have trouble saying something with a Yorkshire accent. There’s some easy phrases I’ve come up with for demonstration purposes, but I can’t just wing it. In preparing for this trip and hooking up with old friends on Facebook, I’ve found that I’ve started channeling the accent again. Phrases, words and pronunciations that I never remembered have come back and when I would think about the trip, I would often think about it with a Yorkshire accent.

So the last day was a time for goodbyes. Wished farewell to the bartenders I’d become a little too familiar to and enjoyed our last dinner with our table mates. John and Amy’s cat had fared well with the eight dogs on the crossing. They’d also discovered that they had two fewer pieces of luggage to load into the car than they thought. Hopefully they hadn’t lost anything overboard. Pat had wished farewell to her favorite dance host, Bruce. And she and Melissa were all set to Eurorail around the continent.

I didn’t sleep much the last night. Couldn’t get to sleep and once I did woke up two hours later. Ended up wandering the decks as we approached Southampton and witnessed our docking.

And then the crossing was over. On to North Yorkshire.