RMS QUEEN MARY

Over fifty years ago when I was a young twenty six year old short time sailor with a one month old new  baby RMS Queen Mary pulled into our lives. By our our, I mean both myself and the City of Long  Beach. The old regal gal has sit inside of her little breakwater across the bay from downtown Long Beach all of this time.

During this time, I have been aboard the ship over a dozen times. Usually on tours and once to meet and greet QM2 to Long Beach but I never got around to spending a night on board. It's like the time I took my sister to Disneyland years ago. She said that i probably got tired of going to Disneyland and I told her that the only time that I went was when someone from back east came out and wanted to go there. Which wasn't that often.

Well we took a page out of the tourist's guide book today and went to RMS QM. The Sunday brunch is said to be, according to a traveler's magazine, the best in the world. I don't know about "the best in the world", but I would rank it in the top five. The best I've ever been to is at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Fran. But good eats in San Fran is no big surprise. 

Spending an overnighter on a ship is not a real big deal. I've lived on an aircraft carrier, a destroyer, I lived on my schooner for thirty five years and on the trawler now for four years.  The Queen however is a whole new experiance. She is the stuff of legends. She is the one and only Gray Ghost. 

USS Constellation, the carrier that I was on was big, one could put both  Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth on the flight deck at the same time and neither would hang over the edge but the true measure of the size of a ship is it's displacement. The Queens both top out by over ten thousand tons over Connie and you can feel the magnitude of this ship while walking around aboard. 

The view of downtown Long Beach from our porthole is also incredible. This is the stuff that my dreams are made of.