Almost six months since the last cruise as I’d had to cancel one pending some fairly hefty dental surgery, so I felt a bit out of practice and slightly nervous about my maiden voyage on Queen Victoria from Rome to Barcelona via Trieste. However, The Other Professor Sanders liked the look of some of the Adriatic ports so decided to accompany me, and we chose to drive down to Nantes airport rather than fly to Rome from Paris as the hotels at CDG are so pricey. Abi at Cunard was happy for me to arrange the flights – budget airlines both ways with the bags costing more to transport than the people. Turned out to be a bit of a mistake really – Nantes isn’t a very nice airport to spend time in. You get what you pay for, I suppose.
Things surprisingly improved when we boarded the Easyjet flight as a couple with a child needed our seats for some reason and the purser moved us up to Row One. Result. I’d booked a taxi to Civitavecchia and the driver got us there within the hour where we stayed at a little hotel in a back street – very welcoming manager who sat us down with an Aperol spritz and went over a map of the town with us before booking a cab to the ship next morning. Excellent.
Priority boarding worked well after a short wait with some Americans who apologised for their president and we found our cabin stateroom on deck 4, one of a block reserved for “entertainers” with a lifeboat in the window. Turned out to be directly above the Queen’s Room so a bit noisy apart from silent disco nights. There was a letter waiting from the entertainment team detailing times of talks and a sound check so that was a bit of a relief after my last experience on QM2 – four sea days, four talks. Celebrity speaker in week one was Paul McKenna, ‘hypnotist and behavioural scientist’ according to Wikipedia, and Will Carling, erstwhile England rugby captain, did the job in week two. I didn’t try a free week on McKenna’s app as I didn’t want to lose weight, improve my self-confidence, sleep better, be less anxious, be happier, get rich or quit smoking. I caught part of one of his talks and he seemed to be, inter alia, a practitioner of Neurolinguistic Programming. If you want to find out more about NLP the Wikipedia entry is worth a look. Will Carling was very pleasant and we had a brief conversation about our favourite pub in Durham.
First day was a sea day and my first talk – and the smallest audience I’d ever had…about 150 people with the front six rows completely empty. The young lady who introduced me asserted this was a good size audience for a sunny day in the Mediterranean at lunch time, but it was difficult to engage with them. C’est la vie. I consoled myself in the Commodore Club before dressing up to celebrate TOPS’ birthday in the posh restaurant..
Two days in Greek ports but it was very very hot – mid to upper thirties. When I got back to the cabin stateroom after a morning in Corfu I was quite poorly and thought I’d succumbed to the norovirus but it turned out to be a case of heatstroke, and I was a bit more careful ashore after that. The whole two weeks remained very hot indeed – too hot really as we couldn’t manage whole days in the ports and had to retreat to the air-conditioned ship.
Fortunately, the audiences grew with each talk – still smaller than I’m used to, but all the entertainment hosts said they were bigger than speakers usually get. The other noticeable difference was the demographic- lots of Americans, Australians, East Europeans and Chinese. I confess I looked into other talks and audiences were very small – even the celeb speakers weren’t filling the theatre as they usually do. Interestingly, Abi from Cunard contacted me after I got back to change a booking next year, saying demographic changes and the comparatively few sea days on Med cruises were making it difficult to justify the Insight programmes. Maybe I should stick to transatlantic crossings…indeed, next up is Iceland and Norway on Arcadia so plenty of sea days. And it should be a lot cooler. Lets hope I get a decent stateroom cabin.
thehairypsychologist 