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Home > Ocean Liners > QE2 > QE2 News > 2002 to 2005 News > QE2, a farewell to the days of crossing the Atlantic

A farewell to the days of crossing the Atlantic

Gone, the Atlantic challenge

By Peter Mandel, Boston Globe Correspondent, 9/14/2003

Like so much else in life, travel changes shape slowly. There are no announcements from the bridge that things will be different now, that you have sailed or flown into a new world. E-tickets take over from the cardboard kind, upstart airlines elbow out the big, traditional names, and we get used to the new -- trip by trip, hour by hour, day by day.

But for me there is one sea change of this sort that, although I've had time to absorb it, still refuses to seem real. It is the simple fact that the Atlantic Ocean between New York and Southampton, England; Boston and Dublin; Montreal and Le Havre, France, is no longer full of passengers on ships.

I grew up in Chelsea on Manhattan's West Side, watching from our rooftop as liners like the Queen Mary, the France, and the United States steamed up the choppy Hudson. I would bring binoculars with me to keep track as they obeyed their tugboats and disappeared into their piers. Then I would run up the stairs again to see them sail back out, and wish I could invent a way to get aboard. Later, I did sail out on the first Queen Elizabeth, when my parents moved us to London. My brother and I tried to explore every deck of that steel world and began to believe that it was a building like the one we lived in, only one that was tipped on its side. But this building could not be torn down: With all its wave-cutting power, its rivets of iron, its interior ways of life, it was a thing that could not die.

But it did die, finally coming to rest at the bottom of Hong Kong Harbor. And most of its peers are dead, too. In a few years, the last two liners built specifically for the North Atlantic -- Cunard's QE2 and Norwegian Line's Norway (once the France) -- will also be out of service, although the new Queen Mary 2 (which debuts next year) will sometimes make the New York to England trip.

Despite the boom in cruise ships designed for warm-water sailing, despite the "repositioning routes" that move these floating hotels from Lisbon to Miami, from Caribbean to Mediterranean, it still seems like a strange dream to me that the fleets of Atlantic liners are gone.

Wooden deck chairs, tartan blankets, beef bouillon in bad weather, rope coils called "quoits." Little traditions filled up your five or six days out of sight of land. That, and making it through a high and deep domain that is as dangerous as the moon.

For a last view of this gray world, my wife and I set off on two recent voyages on the QE2: both Atlantic crossings in porthole-less cabins -- all we could afford. For me, a Caribbean cruise lacks the element of adventure.

Sign on for an April ocean trip, like our first one, and you end up in watery valleys that, unlike those in a landscape, are constantly being reshaped by wind and weather. The light in the Atlantic is more fickle than any other.

One minute, silver sparkles from every wave; the next, the ocean has stolen the color of the seagulls that fly over it: blue-gray with tips of white.

The QE2, like other ships, has one of its TV channels tuned to a round-the-clock view from the bridge. The ship's bookstore manager told me she was lying in her cabin one stormy night and happened to snap this on. Instead of the usual view of the ship's prow with the moonlit sea scrolling past, she was amazed to see a mountain of white rising up in front of the camera. A second later she was tossed out of bed as a giant rogue wave hit the QE2 head-on.

The ship sailed on without damage but passengers and crew still remember the sensation of running into this wall of water.

Even our second trip, taken in the calm and balmy month of July, started off with two rough, prototypically Atlantic days. This leg of the journey contained the captain's reception for passengers in the elite Queen's Grill and Princess's Grill dining classes. My wife and I sat with our drinks in the Chart Room Bar and watched a parade of men in tuxedos and women in sequined gowns staggering as each new swell thundered into the sturdy hull of the ship.

This was weather from the bad old days of sailing. Weather that the liners down to their very rivets knew they had to push through. But no one I saw missed a step or let go of a full glass.

For a second, ours was a ship of intrepid travelers, of those who kept on going where they needed to go. Some made heroic thrusts of outstretched hands to stay in balance. Some held onto chairs or stools at the bar.

A few, like me, looked out the window into an apocalypse of foam, and smiled.

Peter Mandel writes books for children, including "My Ocean Liner," about a boy's voyage on the French Line's Normandie. He lives in Providence.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

Click here for original article on Boston Globe website (well you could previously, but now they removed it!).  It was at http://www.boston.com/travel/getaways/cruises/articles/2003/09/14/a_farewell_to_the_days_of_crossing_the_atlantic/

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