I Took a Cruise on The World's LAST Ocean Liner

i've been cruising on modern cruise ships for years but i've always wanted to try a cruise on a traditional ocean liner when i saw the only remaining ocean liner in the entire world cruising from my local cruise port i knew that i had to give it a go i didn't know what cruising on an ocean liner would be like everything i knew about ocean liners came from the early 20th century with the most famous ocean liner of all of course being the titanic i didn't know if this cruise would be the modern day equivalent of the titanic and if it was would i enjoy it and would i fit in as soon as we walked up to the queen mary 2 we knew that this was going to be an interesting cruise we didn't know at that point just how interesting the cruise would be but like with most cruises i seem to take we have medical emergencies we had urgent repairs and we even had a fire breakout on board as soon as we walked into the atrium we were greeted with lots of crew members wearing these very cute red outfits and hats cunad are very proud of their service they call it the white star service i was so excited and happy to be on board and i knew that there were a few things that i had to do on this cruise i wanted to try the very formal formal nights i knew that i had to go to afternoon tea i wanted to find the kennels where the dogs were kept yes the dogs were kept on the cruise and i also wanted to find the homer simpson there is a homer simpson hidden in a piece of art on board the queen mary there are over 5 000 separate pieces of art on board so that last one was not going to be easy straight away i realized that the layout of the ship wasn't like any ship that i've been on before i thought that i would get used to it but spoiler alert i never did there are a few design differences between ocean liners and cruise ships but at this point i didn't really realize how that would affect our day-to-day life on board this cruise the positioning of the public areas on board is different from most other ships and the ship is missing a few classic cruise ship design features such as a big pool deck and an outside pool i was hoping that the way that the ship was constructed would mean that we wouldn't feel any movement on board my last cruise was pretty rough quite a lot of us were quite seasick and i didn't really want to repeat that again i don't know how but somehow we did manage to make it to our cabin i had booked the cheapest inside cabin on board i hadn't selected my location and i was assigned cabin 6198 we had to go to our cabins to watch the safety drill on the cabin tv that was pretty easy and our cruise cards were waiting for us just outside of our cabin the queen mary 2 was launched in 2003 and despite the fact that she has been well looked after there are a few things i think specifically in these cabins that do give away the age of the cruise ship it was all very clean though we had plenty of storage and the beds were very very comfortable i bought my trusty daylight alarm clock so that we wouldn't have to wake up in the dark and we even had a kettle so that every morning we could wake up and have a cup of tea tea is a very big part of cruising with cunard and i was really looking forward to the traditional afternoon tea in our cabins there was a piece of card that said where we would be dining and when cunard do mostly fixed dining and because i was cruising with family i hope that we would be sat together and eating together on a table our bookings were linked but we were given different embarkation and different disembarkation times so i wasn't 100 sure that we were going to be on the right table thankfully we were and we didn't have to do anything it wouldn't have been the end of the world if we weren't we could have gone to the reception and sorted it out but nobody really wants to start their cruise by trying to sort out problems my mom was cruising on this cruise and when she was unpacking her stuff on embarkation day she found this bra that had been left behind by a previous passenger if this is yours and you're missing it please let me know in the comments one of the things that often happens with short cruises like this is that the crew are very very busy on turnaround day getting everybody out getting everybody back in and clearly this bra was just missed it gave us a good laugh anyway i just hope that whoever's it is is not missing it too much i was on the cruise with my family and fellow crews youtubers paul and carol love to travel and tristan and justin the cruise boys we would often meet up for a pre-dinner drink every drink that you buy on a cunard cruise will have 15 percent gratuity added to it automatically so it's very very easy to spend a lot of money on drink if you're not paying attention when you are on a cunard cruise you can see every drink transaction and everything that you have spent inside the app on your phone make sure you keep an eye on that just so that you know how much you are spending after finding our cabins our thoughts quickly change to food as they often do on a cruise and we decided to go to the pub for a traditional pub lunch if a cruise ship has a pub that serves food that can be a great option for embarkation day everybody goes to the main dining room everybody goes to the buffet and it tends to be a bit calmer in the pub i had a cauliflower pie which was very nice and between us i think we tried almost everything on the menu the food in the pub was really good and the food in the main restaurant and the buffet were good too i wasn't really very impressed with room service but more about that later if you are taking a qnad cruise and you have a sweet tooth you are absolutely in for a treat i do i love the donuts i love the brownies i love the cookies i love the marshmallows and they had so many of these on the cruise it was valentine's day during our cruise so everything was in a love heart shape which was very cute but we could always find donuts on this cruise and they're some of the best donuts that i have ever had anywhere at sea on land anywhere amazing donuts one day when i was eating in the buffet an overhead announcement was made saying that they needed the medical team to go to the silo for code fire i don't know if you know much about titanic history but the titanic also had a fire in one of its silos so that's not something you want to hear when you're on an ocean liner it was about five minutes later they did another announcement saying that the fire was out it was all in hand we didn't need to worry and that was it for that five minutes i was on a cruise ship that was on fire didn't really affect me i just carried on easing in the buffet to be quite honest with you the pub is a very popular venue on board this is where they'll do trivia and they normally do trivia a couple of times a day we saw a guitarist in here who was fantastic and they even brought round little bowls of crisps potato chips to the americans but crisps it was amazing the queen mary 2 does have the biggest library at sea with over 10 000 books on board most cruise ships will have a library but it tends to be an afterthought it tends to be just in the corner of a space and i've never seen a library quite like this one on any ship before it was huge the ship does have something that other cruise ships don't and that is a planetarium the planetarium would put on a few shows per day you sit in this middle section a big dome comes down around you and they project the stars and the sun and everything in space above you it's really really cool and i would definitely recommend it it is free to go to on the queen mary 2 and it's not something you'd normally see on a cruise ship a couple of the viking cruise ships do have a similar planetarium on orion and jupiter but cunards is much much bigger as well as the planetarium the queen mary 2 does have a theatre it's split over two levels and there's shows here every day the type of shows that were shown were very traditional cruise ship content it would be singers it would be dancers it would be jugglers and we watched some good shows in here i did find some of the seating on the lower level to be a little bit strange if you were sat in these seats it very much felt like you were in the way of the people who were behind you we would normally sit on the top level and there were some amazing views from there if you sit right on the side so you'll be able to see down when people are coming out of the stage you'll be able to see kind of off the side and i thought that was very cool i love looking where i'm not supposed to be able to see in the theater cunard have traditionally had a reputation for being for an older passenger demographic i took my first q a cruise in 2016 and that's definitely the impression i came away with but the average cunard passenger is 55 and the average cruiser generally is 47 so it's only eight years older than the average cruiser across all cruise lines i don't know if they've gained themselves that reputation just because everything on board is so traditional but there were people in their 20s their 30s their 40s their 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s probably their hundreds on this cruise that may have been affected though by the fact that this was a short weekend cruise who tend to get younger people on the shorter cruises it was here in the theater that i felt the ship moved for the first and probably only time during the cruise normally on a cruise you will feel some level of background movement it may just be vibrations it may be things slightly moving but on the queen mary 2 we never felt anything before this cruise i knew that she was an ocean liner i knew that that meant that we shouldn't feel the movement as much but i didn't realize it was honestly like being in a building that was docked by the sea instead of being on a ship it was incredible incredible walking around the ship there were lots of big lounges and we were cruising at reduced capacity but everything felt very elegant very classy and very posh your britishism of the week for this queen mary 2 video has got to be the word posh because everything about this cruise was posh posh tends to mean expensive it tends to mean high class if i was to say that this state room looked posh i would mean that it looked fancy that it looked classy and that it looked expensive many people say that the word posh came from port out starboard home meaning that if you were posh you would have the best side on the ship both ways there is no evidence though that that is what that actually means but the word posh has been used for hundreds of years the queen mary 2 has a lounge called the commodore club which is right at the front of the ship and you would expect normally to feel some sort of movement here but we didn't feel anything we didn't have fantastic weather on this cruise we had waves that were almost as big as on my last cruise where we got terribly seasick but the queen mary 2 just handled it so well it was night and day different when i came back from my last cruise i said that it had put me off ever taking a transatlantic cruise because to be honest it was just miserable feeling seasick day after day but i'm changing that now i will only do a transatlantic cruise or a cruise with many sea days on the queen mary 2 because she is absolutely magic absolutely magic because the queen mary 2 is an ocean liner and she's designed for travelling long distances normally in bad weather the ship doesn't have an outside pool and a traditional pool deck that you'd find on most cruise ships she does have a tiered aft which is very very tiered and there is a swimming pool here but that is about it for outside space generally speaking people may play shuffleboard they may walk a few laps around outside but the ship isn't designed for everybody to be outside it's an inside ship the ship has a proper promenade deck too with the nice wooden deck and passengers will be walking around and around this promenade deck come rain or shine some very questionable weather we had on this cruise but that did not stop people from walking their laps around the promenade deck i was sat inside at the buffet when i filmed this watching everybody else walking i had a doughnut i was inside i was warm i was very happy and not going outside on most cruise ships you'll find that the buffet is high up it's normally near the pool deck but on the queen mary 2 the buffet is on deck 7. my cabin was on deck six so having the buffet on deck seven was very nice but it was strange to keep walking through the buffet to get to places because it was right in the middle of the ship i'm not sure if it was made more difficult during our cruise because some corridors were closed off for coved quarantining but we would consistently be getting to places and finding doors that we couldn't go through we would be walking through the spa we'd be walking through the restaurants we'd be walking through the art gallery to try and find places i've never been so confused with the layout of a ship and if you ask me right now how to get from any place to any other place i can't tell you a single thing the staircases on board were labeled abcd and i knew that i could only get to my cabin through the c and d staircases but there were lots of things like that where you could only get to them through certain stairs certain stairs wouldn't go to other places and to be honest i think i would need two weeks a month maybe on board to actually learn my way around cunard's website actually says you won't get lost if you simply imagine her as a three-dimensional city grid an enormous cube with four stairwells well cunard i did try that and i got totally lost that is not true for me during our four night cunard cruise we had two formal nights and two smart casual nights for the formal nights i wore long dresses you're not going to be over dressed for a cunard cruise i think that is impossible and for the smart casual nights the informal nights i wore what i would normally wear for a formal night on any other cruise line your weekly piece of cruise trivia is that ed sheeran actually recorded a big percentage of his album divide on board the queen mary 2. his producer didn't want to fly so they decided that they would sail across on the queen mary too ed sheeran never ate in the main dining room though because he didn't want to put on a suit you would think maybe cuna would make an exception for the ed sheeran i guess not our cruise was very much a cruise of two halves we cruised across to hamburg and then back from hamburg to southampton some people only did the first part of the cruise some people joined us in hamburg and from that point on board everything on board was in english and german we had a brilliant day in hamburg when we did get there but if you are visiting hamburg on a sunday be aware that all of the main restaurants the shops and the bars will be closed it was quite creepy wandering around such a big city with nobody there we managed to walk over 20 000 steps it was a pretty chilly day but it was very very nice to get out and have a look around we docked very far out but cunard did put on a free shuttle which took around half an hour to get into central hamburg cunard are the strictest cruise line i know of when it comes to formal dress if you're somebody who doesn't like formal nights doesn't like getting dressed up i wouldn't recommend a cunard cruise to you there are so many cruise lines with very very relaxed dress codes or no dress codes at all but if formality is not your thing i don't think a cunard cruise is for you the thing that i found a bit difficult was that the dress code applied pretty much ship wide so one evening we stayed in and we had room service and then wanted to go to the theater i was wearing my jeans at that point but i knew that to go to the theater i would have to get dressed up and i don't always want to do that sometimes i just want to go to the theater in my jeans it was fine for this short cruise but it's something you need to be aware of if you are cruising with cunard you may be wondering why should i even bother dressing formally on a cruise and i saw this quote on the ship which did make me laugh it said dress smartly as well as sensibly in case you are washed overboard being well dressed would elicit greater respect from the person finding the body i have to say that hasn't ever affected my decision of what to wear on a cruise before but there you have it something to think about i took my first and only cunard cruise back in 2016 and the room service was one of my favorite things about it i remember ordering this massive chocolate fudge cake and sitting and eating it as we sailed away from kotor i have to say i did feel disappointed by the vegetarian options on the room service menu the only vegetarian main was mac and cheese which i'd already had for lunch we asked them if i could have something off menu like a veggie burger as i knew they did those in the buffet but they said they couldn't do anything like that and i basically ended up with the cheese sandwich it was fine i like cheese sandwiches but it was nothing amazing in the way that i had remembered room service is free on cunard though so that is pretty cool one afternoon my family decided to go to a lecture in the planetarium and i decided that i would go and try and find the kennels the kennels where people do keep their cats and their dogs if they are going on transatlantic cruises the last that i heard was that it cost around a thousand dollars to take a pet on a transatlantic cruise which is pretty much the same price as you would pay for a human but they are very very well looked after it's a very sought after service and you normally have to book at least a year in advance it's a great alternative i imagine to flying with a pet and i'm sure they are totally spoiled there's 24 kennels on board they even have a lamppost so that the british dogs can do their business there and a fire hydrant for the american dogs the owners of the pets can visit the pets at certain times but it is only certain times you can't take your cat into the main restaurant you can't walk your dog around your cabin it's only visiting hours and in a specific place all over the ship were amazing pieces of artwork and lots of boards like this which told us about the history of the ships and the history of cunard i was looking for one very specific piece of art though i had heard that somewhere on board there was a tiny homer simpson and i was determined to find him i did manage to find him he is on deck 2 and he is in this american section he is tiny and he is a bit faded i guess because people have been poking him to say that they found him i did that too so i'm contributing to that but that was very fun cruising on the queen mary 2 definitely gave me some idea of what it would have been like to cruise on a traditional ocean liner to find out what it was actually like back in the day though you need to watch this video i stayed on board the original queen mary that launched in 1936 she's gained herself quite a reputation for being the most haunted ship in the world and if you see any similarities between the queen mary and the queen mary 2 in this video let me know you should do

Channel: Emma Cruises

Views: 1,684,320

Keywords: cruise, cruise tips, emma cruises, Queen Mary 2, Cunard, Cunard cruise, QM2

Id: VrBXLQWHdZc

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022