D&N

No idea why, but that latest link always brings me back to this page. I caught up with the blog through the browsers autocomplete. Interesting as usual! I've always made our own lemsips. Crushing tablets with a spoon and adding orange, lemonade, honey and sometimes brandy. Suppose I should call it orangesip. We stir or swirl the cup to ensure all the paracetamol is mixed through as we drink. A great thing for keeping sinuses clear is a little bottle called Neilmed. They sell sachets of mix for it, but we just add salt and bicarb of soda to warm water. I'm sure it would offer some relief without the bicarb if you could only get salt from dining room. Rinsing out the sinuses a couple of times a day makes things a bit more comfortable. Thankfully we've only had a couple of colds in last 7 and a bit years so it doesn't get much use.

@Covepointcruiser Back in August in a "Quebec disembarkation" thread he explained that he was leaving QM2 the day before official disembarkation to join Serenity. I assume there were no baggage facilities in place due to that.

When I look in the mirror; I see an active millennial. 🤣 I think I overtake a few of them on my regular seafront runs.

Welcome and thank you for a very comprehensive report. It's very thorough. I'm guessing due to you embarking in Hamburg and your comments on tips that you might be German. We're British but live in France. We used to visit Germany between one and three times a year between 1992 and 2003. I'll not comment on everything as we have specific interests and don't make use of much of the entertainment available. As we're only interested in the QM2 we join and leave at Southampton and have no interest in port call arrangements. We don't really care about rust. It's superficial and the ship won't sink because of it. It's due a visit to dry dock next month when some of that might be attended to. Living in France we're used to what appear to be moody service staff and don't expect better. In practice we generally get on very well with most of them, particularly in venues that we have visited over a long period of time, but it's a recurring theme when friends or family visit these venues without us that they often report that the service was borderline rude. We took all our meals in the Britannia Club Restaurant on QM2 and didn't experience any service problems. The sommelier did seem to be busier on our Eastbound trip. Regarding wine orders; 10 minutes is not an unusual time to wait for a bottle of wine to be delivered to the table at our local restaurants. If I found on the first night that the wine didn't arrive as quickly as I would like, on subsequent nights I would refuse to order food until I had placed the wine order. When we used to eat out in Germany I didn't find service staff any more friendly than in France. We always ordered everything carefully in German and invariably they would answer and summarise our order in English. I'll jump to tipping. It comes down to cultural differences. In France almost all restaurants are "Service Compris". Gratuities are included in the bill and traditionally if you had paid in cash and received change you might leave the centimes and take any euros away. As Brits we generally tip 10% as we would have done in UK. If we're out with French friends we often tip less because that's what they are doing and we don't want to appear too vulgar. We try and make that up next time we visit the venue on our own. In the US, tipping is the norm and 20% is more common. I imagine Germany is more like France. Your correct. UK and US guests are charged for gratuities automatically and need to ask for them to be removed if they are unhappy with the service, and some do so because they don't agree with the principle. Music. We dance; so are looking for music we can dance to in entertainment venues. The Chart Room often had a string trio or a jazz band playing when we visited. We could have talked over both of those easily. However we try not to ruin the experience for other guests and often feel it's rude to talk too loudly while artists are playing. I was most disappointed that my wife refused point blank to join me in a foxtrot around the Chart Room to some of the numbers performed by the jazz band!

The cabin change fairy 🧚‍♀️ contacted me this morning to advise that Cunard had agreed to move us from the only A1 grade cabin that was being offered for sale on M514A Round Trip Transatlantic in June 2025 to our first choice cabin, which had been allocated to M514 Westbound & M515 Eastbound. Knowing the fairies would be busy magicking up bookings for other folk, I had checked where our preferred cabin was and gave them the details to pose the question to Cunard. Hattie, Hopefully that complies! 🙂

@2Oldpeopleinlove I was concerned after last time that we could have made more effort to maximise our dance opportunities so went back through the programs and listed all the events in Queens Room or G32. Next time we'll try and plan our days to catch as much as possible. The attached file abbreviates Queens Room to QR. Anything pre 19:00 is dance classes, not including line dancing or zumba that don't interest us. The main event was always 21:00 and if a band in G32 that was at 21:30. I note that the current trip to Canada has those at 20:45 and 21:45 respectively. Judging is perhaps a bit extreme, but folk (including other dancers) watch and can't help thinking one couple is better than another. Often that means that their eye follows dancers that they think are good and don't really bother with the rest. We don't care that much what others think of our dancing but try and maintain a standard that our past teachers would be happy with if they were to see us. Thankfully the 10 seconds of us I discovered on YouTube looked ok! Hopefully the file is understandable. Dance events QM2 June 2022.pdf

The teachers that we've come across suggest moderate "Arm Flinging" or "Armography" [sic] (from Strictly). I think teachers generally called it arm placement. Competition dancers get a bit extreme but in that scenario it's expected. For social, the arms are best to be roughly in line with your shoulders to create a nice shape and it can help with balance. It can also make movements look more flowing e.g. you make a sequence of steps to the left and finish by extending your left arm and hand. That all depends on you knowing you won't hit anyone. As a couple our heads will be about 18" apart and we'll both have close to 180° field of vision, so there's no reason why we shouldn't know where all the other dancers are. You are entitled to not like it, but dance teachers tell pupils to use their arms correctly. They often say that drooping arms at your side or looking down at your feet while dancing tells those watching that you don't have any confidence in what you're doing.

@Victoria2 Again it comes down to skill. A fancy term might be spatial awareness. If you want to fling arms, as long as you know that you are flinging into an empty space there shouldn't be a problem. I do prefer to see even beginners holding their arms up in latin dances as it looks far better than having them dangling at their sides like a "seagull with a broken wing" to quote a past dance teacher. If the floor is that packed then we sometimes dance in a sort of cuddle hold that stops any elbows from sticking out and hitting folk. As long as we can keep our balance it doesn't really matter if we are not in the correct hold.

I don't think that the sort of dancer described will always be skilful. If they are then you should dance in front of them to check it out. If they are skilful they will avoid you. If they don't, they are not skilful but inconsiderate and you should sue them for any injuries that you suffer. In practice the only times we found the floor to be really busy were the first few dances on gala nights. Otherwise there was plenty of space for dancers of all levels of proficiency. When party music is played in Queens Room sometimes there is a problem when ballroom dancers hear a piece they can dance to but the floor is full of disco dancers blocking the lines of dance. Some recent threads have published programs listing when recorded music is on, or a small section of the Queens Room band are playing. The floor is usually less crowded during those times than the headline session of each night.

Is that the one with Toulon? It's a bit far from us (90 miles) but there's less chance of missing it due to weather than there is at Cannes or Villefranche. Oh I nearly forgot, we'll be sailing back to Southampton then.

Writing as a retired professional scheduler/planner in the transport industry, Cunard's methods of allocating cabins to itineraries seem very basic. With bus or light or heavy rail there could be several million potential pieces of a jigsaw to cover, and these could result in infinite combinations of potential crew shifts. When I started out all that was done manually on pencil and paper, but for around forty years there have been continually improving software solutions to speed the tasks up and minimise cost. The cabin grade we've booked can only be allocated to four other different itineraries that could overlap while we are onboard. In fact the ones we would prefer are all allocated to the east and west components of our round trip. That makes it a very simple case of two halves or both together. It seems odd that they'll make 90%+ of the cabins available to the east and west crossings only, when it would be quite simple to cross off the same one in each direction and allocate it to the round trip. It ties in with the familiar theme of their IT not being the best.

That nice lady that phoned me earlier was on Explora a month or two back. The photos she posted on Facebook looked great. Destinations not of interest and I didn't see much sign of dancing!

I got a call at 13:10 UK time for my credit card details. I wouldn't normally entertain such a thing, but since I was expecting the call and recognised the lady's voice I didn't have a problem. As she had already warned me, there was only one A1 cabin allocated to the itinerary that we wanted so she was on sharpish and nabbed it. We'll see if we can change it to one of our preferred numbers at a later date. It doesn't have a connecting door, which was the most important thing. It's about 6 cabins further on the wrong side from what we would prefer, but it's not a big issue if we end up staying there.

I won't be booking anything. But I know someone who will.

I hadn't found an entry for Nuuk in my zone settings, but realised when I researched a few days ago that it was a sub menu of a Greenland option.

I looked up "android scan and combine to pdf" for future use. On Android it can be done through Google Drive https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9308884?hl=en I tried it with 3 pages of a wine catalogue. You need to tap bulk add before each additional page. I've not figured out if you can choose to have pages portrait rather than landscape yet. Might simply be a case of turning phone round. Scanned_20231002-1205.pdf

You'll probably be disappointed. It is not clotted cream served with scones in Queens Room at afternoon tea. It's a sort of quenelle shaped dollop of thick sweetish chantilly like cream. It's quite a nice cream but not clotted. I have seen photos of clotted cream being served, which might have been from the Grills Lounge.

It was 25 years ago past July that we sailed 7 nights northbound Vancouver to Seward on Sun Princess. I wore my black dinner suit on one formal and my ivory tux on the other. My wife wore gowns. I varied between a suit and tie and open necked shirt on other nights. There may have been a semi-formal option back then. We also did about 7 nights of land tours. We had two huge bags, and probably far more luggage than we really needed if we had planned properly. Our table companions were another couple and two single ladies travelling together. The other guy wore dark suit and tie on formal nights. Formal night compliance was probably 90%+ tuxes. But we did spot one family group threading through the throng, presumably to the buffet, in shell suits and trainers. In talking to some of the crew; they said that on the odd occasion they were able to get off ship for an evening and visited clubs and bars in Alaska, they felt overdressed in jeans! The region does appear to have a reputation for casual dress.

Moonset and Sunrise at same time this morning.

In each direction you are likely to have two Gala Evenings on nights 2 and 6. Normally the themes are Black & White and Masquerade westbound and Red & Gold and Roaring Twenties eastbound. It's highly unlikely that will change. Besides there is no obligation to follow the themes. You can simply follow general gala evening guidance. And you can exceed the dress code. There's nothing to stop you dressing formally every night if you want.

I don't generally need alarms to wake me in the morning and I think there were enough clocks around the ship or the cabin phone to tell us the time. However I do like to keep the time updated on my phone and camera so that photos have the correct digital time stamp in the data. Last time I had difficulty finding a time zone for GMT-2 on my phone and had to set that manually. I've figured it out for next time. I forgot to do that with the camera I'd taken, but it was only used for a limited number of snaps. I used an app to bulk change the exif data in the files to the correct times. The new camera makes it easy to change between zones in each direction.

I'm told that A1 and A2 grades are $145 per person for the 14 night trip we want. Don't know about others. That came from my agent. You could ask an agent about others. I book through a UK agent. I wouldn't trust a French agent with something so important!

Likewise our wonderful agent, who shall remain nameless, along with her daughter that we've never dealt with, will attend to our booking. However she has given us her prices and levels of onboard credit for the grade we want. She has also warned us that only a certain quantity of that grade will be available to the itinerary we require. But she can't check cabin numbers at this stage. There are a further four different itineraries that will be on sale that partially overlap the one we want and it's possible that our first choice cabin may be allocated to one of them. Therefore I have supplied her with a list of cabin numbers in order of preference. There are certain cabins within the grade we don't want. If using an agent or even if booking direct, perhaps best to do some homework and make sure you are familiar with what cabins will be acceptable to you and what ones you would want to avoid.

France are inviting the various "at risk" groups to be vaccinated with the latest versions of vaccines from October 2nd. That includes me in the over 65 category. My young 🙂 wife will have hers fully reimbursed as well even though she is hasn't been in a target category for over 2 years. Don't know about the rest of Europe.

We saw Chicago last July, Sunday Matinee at the Ambassador Theatre. We were very disappointed. It seemed amateurish compared to our admittedly distant and infrequent West End and Glasgow/Edinburgh experiences.