The Queen Mary 2 was moored just a short distance from our hotel but still too far to carry our enormous amounts of luggage. A quick Uber trip followed and our luggage was being whisked away from us while we started the embarkation process. We also had two pieces of hand luggage each- both containing things we could not afford to lose or break- including Dottie's ashes. We were very impressed by the speed at which they checked us through passport control and customs, and issued us with our new cruise cards. Before we knew it, we were being greeted by the crew and on our way to our cabin. The cabin had a small protected balcony but was plenty of room for us and our luggage, which most impressively arrived not long after us. We unpacked the majority of our clothes etc and found that there was more than enough closet and drawer space, as well as a huge space under the bed to store our actual roll on bags. We were very glad we had packed soft bags as they took up very little room.
Time to explore the ship and get our bearings! Ironically, we found the pub first and tried a flight of their own labelled beer. Not bad!
Cunard give you a paper Daily Programme so you can keep track of activities and events onboard. The first thing we marked was the Sailaway Celebration at 5 PM at the Terrace bar at the back of the ship which we headed for as the time came.
We were chatting to someone whilst we were taking photos of ourselves and the iconic background when I noticed someone out of the corner of my eye who I thought I recognized. I couldn't believe it when I turned to see who it was, and saw Joel and Stevie- our travelling friends from California onboard with us! I burst into tears with surprise and delight. They had schemed to join us on our trip but ever so carefully. We can normally 'see' where they are on Google Maps as we share locations (they had turned that off), and had sent us a photo taken of them sending 'cheers' with a glass of something outside their house that morning (it was water, and actually taken the day before- right before they flew out to join us). They knew where we were staying as we had, of course, told them, and so they had managed to avoid us in Brooklyn. They had even watched us arrive at the docks and managed stay out of our sight whilst they boarded too. The only problem they had was finding us on the ship itself!
Best surprise ever! This was was taken by one of the ship photographers and I love it.
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