Happy Valentines Day!!
Cupid made a surprise visit to the ship.....
....but I think I'll stick with Chuck!!
Whenever we think we couldn’t possibly be coddled any more than we already are….Cunard comes up with something else! Every single day is like those multi-layered “surprise balls” that you unwind to find all sorts of hidden treasures. We’ve come to think of our room steward as “Santa Claus!” It seems that every few nights we come back from dinner to find gifts left on our bed….tote bags, hats, robes, jewelry travel cases, pins, cufflinks, plants, etc, etc, etc. (…more than enough to stock a HUGE yard sale when we get home!) We already decided there was no way we could pack everything up for an airplane trip home, so….we’ve booked space on the Queen Mary to come back to New York! (Along with about 400 other round-the-world Americans!) It will be fun to compare ships! We’re not even to the half-way point yet and we can’t even begin to imagine life off the ship! We hope that Cunard will offer some kind of reentry program for us when it comes time to cut the umbilical cord! (Maybe they could come and turn down our bed only every other day and leave only one chocolate instead of two to wean us away gently from all this pampering…) So, as one would expect, there is a real holiday atmosphere on the ship today – bunches of red and pink balloons everywhere, guys dressed up as Cupid for photo-ops (see photo above - - they definitely aren’t paid enough!), and fancy valentine confections stationed all about the public areas. It’s like being in first grade again when you can’t wait to open all the valentines in your glued-together cut-and-paste heart-shaped mailbox!
Sometimes we think the people we’re meeting on the ship are even more interesting than the ports! Friendships are made quickly as we rapidly become a floating family. Tonight we happened to sit next to an interesting older couple in the entertainment theatre. Chuck asked them where they were from and when they said Michigan, I was excited to talk to them about my old stomping grounds. By the end of the show, they ended up inviting us back to their penthouse suite for a drink. Once there, he powered up his computer and showed us photos of his unbelievable antique car collection ….twenty-one cars in absolutely pristine condition….from a 1902 Oldsmobile with tiller steering to a 1983 gull wing Delorean….with a little of everything in-between, including a 1914 Silver Ghost Rolls Royce Touring car! They also had their own airplane so were quite excited to be able to talk about cars and airplanes with Chuck. I was a little nervous about the couple we met who are going around the world for the ninth time and were on the Cunard ship that caught fire in the China Sea. They were all put on another ship....which then ran aground on a reef in the Gulf of Aquba! (Reminder to self: Get to work organizing that little bag of "stuff" to be used in the event that we have to abandon ship!) And I'm particularly amused by the little English lady who has a border collie who persists in "rounding up" anyone wearing a fur coat!
No comments:
Post a Comment