sfred

According to @bluemarble's pdf:

🎶 There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Bilbao 🎶 Hmmmm... Doesn't sound right.

QE is in Vancouver Canada today 17 August. A webcam of her arrival at dawn this morning is shown below. This is the final Vancouver call of the 2023 Alaska season. Upon departure this evening, she will turn southward en route to the Mediterranean via the Panama Canal. Best wishes to all passengers joining today in Vancouver. We'll be boarding Sunday 20th in San Francisco.

We're also aboard, from SF through to Barcelona. Really excited! Only a few days to go....

Excellent! - port number 635. I never knew that Ceuta was a Spanish autonomous city within the geographic boundaries of Morocco. A fascinating history is summarised in Wikipedia, passing between the Phoenicians, Rome, Portugal, and Spain. At the independence of Spanish Morocco in 1956, Ceuta remained part of Spain. Spanish is the current official language. I'll classify it as Africa, Spain, Spanish language, former Roman empire, and West longitude. An interesting port to have in our seen list! Thanks @sogne and congratulations @Colin_Cameron.

You're very welcome. Best wishes for a great voyage! Something I forgot to mention before is that if you decide to do the trains, a good way to pay the appropriate fares is with a Japan Rail (JR) Suica card. It's the JR version of a London Transport Oyster card, i.e., a prepaid stored-value card for all trains in the Tokyo area, both commuter trains and the metro. You obtain Suica cards and load the card with a Japanese Yen balance at either JR ticket machines (that you can interact with in English) or in-person ticket offices at major stations and also at Haneda and Narita airports. A special version of Suica, called Welcome Suica, is available to foreign tourists. Welcome Suica is valid for only four weeks and waives the usual Suica card issuance fee. Like the London Oyster, you tap on/off with Suica at the ticket barriers and it automatically debits the correct fare, allowing for transfers. It takes away quite a bit of the worry about whether you've bought the correct ticket. Each person needs his/her own card. The Japan metro version of Suica is called Pasmo. It serves the same function, just issued by a separate rail operator. Suica can be used a little more widely than Pasmo, but the difference is minor. New Suica and Pasmo cards are temporarily in short supply due to a chip shortage, but I imagine that will have been cleared up by the time you are there next year. Mrs. sfred and I easily took trains when we boarded QE for the voyage across to Alaska in 2019. We had one large piece of luggage and two smaller carry-on sized bags. We all did fit into the carriage, but only just. I've been to Tokyo and Japan many times for work and can speak and read a little Japanese which helps, but there is enough English signage to get by without.

When we were aboard QE in 2019, Cunard shuttles went from Yokohama Oshanbashi, adjacent to Nihon-Odori station, and were for excursion passengers only, not embarking/disembarking. As @MomentsNotice indicated, for this recent 2023 season Cunard shuttles went to Yamashita Park, near the Motomachi-Chūkagai station, and were also usable for embarking/disembarking. Trains run from both places to the main Yokohama station where you can change for trains to Tokyo on the JR Yokosuka Line or Keikyu Main Line Rapid.

Trains in Japan are amazingly excellent, and train stations almost always have convenient ramps and lifts to enable wheeled/heavy luggage. Trains from Yokohama to Tokyo are frequent, comparatively inexpensive, and extremely reliable. Count on between 40-60 minutes for the trip, depending on where in Tokyo you are going. Knowing a little Japanese is a plus, but there is also English signage. The one complication, however, is that the trains also tend to be very crowded. You can probably find space for yourselves plus one or two bags, but if you have a lot more then you might not fit easily. It isn't just during "rush hour" - trains are busy at all times. Carriages towards the front or rear tend to have slightly more space. Platforms are clearly marked for where carriages and doors will stop. I've done the reverse route - Tokyo Shinjuku station to Yokohama - for boarding QE A great English or Japanese language web site to get train itineraries and times is at: http://www.hyperdia.com/ I'm envious - Japan is a fantastic country to travel in. Good luck!

As @bluemarble indicates, the Aussie T&Cs do not yet mention the Cunard Upgrade program. I can confirm that I did not receive an offer for our upcoming QE San Francisco to Barcelona voyage. I booked directly with Cunard. Of course, it might also have been due to the voyage being completely sold out in all categories. Have any other Australia or NZ cruise critics received an offer?

Definitely a bit rough. Wave heights 4-5 meters.

Understand and agree, thanks @exlondoner. The flaw in all of my population density calculations is that people are never evenly distributed across the geographic areas, and there will be areas of greater and lower density. I can be sure that there will be a lot more people in any queue that I happen to join. 🙂 I was just curious to see what the order of magnitude differences were in density across some locations I've been to, and thanks to google it was easy to gather the necessary data.

Indeed a busy day in Ketchikan. Thanks @fourmile.ranch. Looks like Westerdam and Norwegian Encore have already sailed. Marine Traffic is showing these two ships now underway south of Ketchikan, with QE, Celebrity Eclipse, and Noordam still alongside in port. Hope you are having a nice day! If all 14,714 total passengers were in town at the same time today (and any crew that might have been ashore in addition), that would be roughly 185% of Ketchikan's local population, and make for a population density of a little over 2,000 people per square kilometer, or about 40% of Southampton, 3% of NYC Manhattan, 2% of the City of London and Hong Kong, and 0.8% of New Delhi India.

From memory, the day we were in Skagway there was only one other ship besides QE. Juneau had two other ships. Neither location felt crowded. Ketchikan was full with four ships, and the areas adjacent to the pier did feel a bit crowded, but not so much as to keep us from doing anything we wanted to do. In all the other ports on our itinerary, QE was the only ship. Mrs. sfred and I were quite often alone on walks, and it was very calm once away from the piers. It occurred to me that an additional comparison that might be useful is Southampton England. An updated table is shown below. Several people here on Cruise Critic have mentioned that Southampton can feel a bit busy when multiple ships are in port. With four ships of an average 3000 people each, Southampton has a population density of 5,171 people per square kilometer. Admittedly, this isn't a completely accurate calculation, as the cruise passengers would be concentrated around the docks, the main shopping streets and the train station. But as an order of magnitude comparison, Juneau would only be 25% as crowded, Ketchikan 35%, and Skagway 16%. If Southampton doesn't feel too busy to you, the Alaska ports perhaps won't either.

@NE John poses an interesting question. The Alaska ports didn't seem too crowded to us during our 2019 voyage, but admittedly we were there relatively early in the season, on QE's first voyage of that year in May. The ports had either QE only, or only one or two additional ships in addition to us. The exception was Ketchikan where all piers were full with four ships in total. This got me to thinking what might be some population density comparisons of Alaska ports, with and without cruise ships, and in comparison to some other large urban areas. I gathered some data from google, and created the below table: As shown, the population density of Juneau, Ketchikan, and Skagway definitely increases significantly when the maximum number of ships are in port. However, even with maximum ship impact, the population density in the Alaska ports is a small fraction of that in places like NYC Manhattan, the City of London, Hong Kong, New Delhi,, or Vancouver. The calculations used an "average" ship size of 3,000 people. If some of the ships are mega-sized, the density would be a little greater. I also used estimates of the average "daytime" populations of the urban city comparisons, reflecting both residents and commuters on a typical workday. For the Alaska port land areas, I used measures of only the urban "city" areas rather than the total areas. Juneau, for example, has a total land area of over 7,000 square kilometers, but only 36.3 square kilometers in the "city". It doesn't take long to get into unpopulated wilderness in the Alaska ports, once away from the crowds at the pier. Hope this helps to provide some interesting comparisons.

QE is at anchor in Juneau Alaska today, with all four available pier positions taken by Discovery Princess, Nieuw Amsterdam, Majestic Princess, and Brilliance of the Seas. A busy day for the port of Juneau! A screen capture from the Juneau Harbor Webcam is shown below, with QE at right.

I haven't been, but the sample menu on the Cunard web site does look tasty. Perhaps Riviera will also be on QE's upcoming Med trips in September. riviera-sample-menu.pdf

With the well known building being the Basilica Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, and the photo looking down the Strada St Giacomo. I'm afraid I can't make out any recognisable details of which ship is in the background.

Great find for the webcam, @bluemarble and congratuations to @NE John and @Host Hattie. That is our eighth port in Denmark, joining Aarhus, Copenhagen, Great Belt, Helsingør/Elsinore, Klaksvik, Skagen, and Torshavn.

The advice you've received from Cunard is correct. Unfortunately, they are unable to link bookings on different itineraries. With your mates doing the TA only, you are onboard for different durations. We encountered this when doing a long weekend from Melbourne to Brisbane on QE. Friends were doing Melbourne to Sydney only, so we couldn't link the bookings. We each selected tables for 2 in our bookings, and then a request to the maitre d' on embarkation got us a very nice table for four. Even if tables for four are all allocated, an alternative would be adjacent tables for 2. Most are close enough to enable dining conversation. You could also push the tables together.

That first step off the gangway onto QM2/QV/QE is memorable every time! Best wishes...

Best wishes for your voyage - look forward to hearing your experiences! Beware - QM2 (and Cunard in general) is addictive. Like many others here, we stepped aboard in Southampton in 2013 intending it to be a one-time thing, and have been entranced ever since.

Unfortunately does not work for me either. I presume not enabled for Aus/NZ, similar to the US.

It starts that way....

Thanks @QM2_SYD. I found a Wikipedia entry on the various ship length acronyms... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_overall ... which has a good explanation of LOA, LWL, LOD, and LOH..

Perhaps it refers to QE's length, which is approx 964 feet?