Queen Mary 2: The world's biggest ocean liner

CRUISE | World's biggest ocean liner is a world unto itself

ATLANTIC OCEAN -- Some cruises are little more than floating frat parties. Others are more like epic voyages, those once-in-a-lifetime-type trips that have an inherent gravitas you just can't get from a weeklong booze cruise in the Caribbean.

A transatlantic crossing aboard the Queen Mary 2 definitely falls into the epic voyage camp.

No ports of call. No belly flop competitions on the lido deck. Instead, it feels somehow important, historic. You're on the world's biggest ocean liner -- three times the size of the Titanic -- traveling 3,000 nautical miles over the imposing waters of the North Atlantic. You start on one continent and end on another. In between, your days and nights are spent aboard one of the most luxurious big ships at sea.

A journey that takes about six hours by plane will take you six days by ship. But it's the difference between taking a taxi or a horse-drawn carriage. One is just a means of transportation; the other is an experience.

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The Queen Mary 2 is the flagship of Cunard, the cruise line whose advertising whizzes half a century ago coined the slogan, "Getting there is half the fun."

Cunard's tradition of transatlantic crossings dates back to 1840, when the company scored a contract to deliver mail by steamship between Britain and North America. These days, several cruise lines' ships take passengers across the Atlantic, but none as often -- or arguably as well -- as the QM2. This year alone, she'll make 25 transatlantic crossings, with most of them being her classic six-day voyage between New York City and Southampton, England.

The QM2 literally was built for this kind of trip. The $800 million ship's long, slender lines, powerful engines, thick steel hull and massive stabilizers make it ideal for slicing through the wild waves of the North Atlantic.

"We're not a cruise ship, ladies and gentlemen. We're a liner," said the QM2's captain, Commodore Bernard Warner, as he raised a champagne toast to passengers on board the QM2 last September, when the liner made its 100th transatlantic crossing. My mother and I were among those 2,470 passengers, traveling from Southampton to New York.

Mom was downright giddy when she caught her first sight of the ship as we pulled up to the dock in Southampton. I'll confess to getting a few goosebumps myself. Cunard vessels are iconic, with their imposing hulls and trademark red and black funnels on top. The sheer size of the QM2 is impressive by even the most seasoned cruiser's standards. Lay the Eiffel Tower on its side, and this floating queen is 147 feet longer.

We crossed the ocean heading west, which is better than going east. Here's why: Because of the time change, you're constantly setting your watch back as you sail west. You pick up an extra hour almost every day of the cruise. And believe it or not, you'll find plenty of ways to fill the time.

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"What are you going to do on a ship for six days?" It's a question more than one person asked before we left on our cruise.

I'd been a little worried about going stir crazy myself, especially since our trip was in late September. I couldn't exactly kill time sunbathing by the pool with a trashy novel.

Turns out you can easily devote an entire day just to finding your way around the ship. It spans the length of four football fields, and the corridors are filled with museum-quality exhibits chronicling the illustrious history of Cunard Line.

I spent a few hours wandering around with a headset on the ship's self-guided audio tour. A couple of interesting nuggets I picked up along the way: Cunard's Queen Elizabeth and other members of the fleet were painted gray and used to carry hundreds of thousands of troops and P.O.W.s during World War II, and Cunard's Carpathia rescued more than 700 survivors of the Titanic, whose watery grave was only a couple hundred miles away from our route across the Atlantic.

When you're not boning up on Cunard's colorful past, you can pass the time with the typical cruise ship offerings -- casino, art auctions, enrichment classes. But the QM2 also has some unique perks, like the 20,000-square-foot Canyon Ranch Spa

outfitted with an elaborate pool, an herbal sauna, aromatic steam room and ornately tiled chamber for Middle Eastern mud cleansing rituals. That's the fun part. The not-as-fun part is a gym and weight room with enough equipment and machines to ensure supply always exceeds demand -- even on a ship this size.

For lazier pursuits, the QM2 also has the only planetarium at sea. Tilt back your reclining seat and look up at the overhead projection screen to watch shows about the origin of the universe. Or check out a book from the world's largest floating library, totaling more than 8,000 titles.

The choices seemed endless. Should I take an indoor cycling class or an acting workshop led by graduates of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art? Tour the kitchen galley? Go on a bubbly binge in the Veuve Clicquot Champagne Bar or listen to guest author Joanne Harris talk about writing a sequel to Chocolat?

I could learn to paint watercolor or take in one of the many lectures, the most intriguing of which was titled "Forensics for Everyone: Let's Bump Off Granny."

A long list of activity options came delivered to our cabin each evening in the glossy "Daily Programme" -- the British spelling being one of the ship's many Anglo touches. Others include afternoon high tea, portraits of the queen, fish 'n' chips at the Golden Lion Pub and trivia competitions rigged in favor of the mostly British crowd. Example: What are the first names of the founders of the department store Marks & Spencer? This prompted an indignant American to pipe up: How about the first names of Sears and Roebuck?

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Given that this was a cruise, we spent a fair bit of our time doing what cruise passengers do best: eating.

"With a transatlantic crossing, your audience is here for six days. You'd better have enough food to feed them," said chef Jean-Marie Zimmermann, a Frenchman who oversees Cunard's cuisine. "We've done these so often I know exactly how much to purchase."

Zimmermann's lengthy shopping list includes 18 pounds of caviar, 1,000 pounds of lobster, 4,500 pounds of beef and 8,000 pounds of chicken. A team of 150 chefs staff QM2's 10 dining venues, which range from the soaring, three-story main dining room to the intimate, self-titled restaurant by celebrity chef Todd English, where it's worth forking over the $30 cover charge for dinner at least once during the course of the cruise.

Passengers staying in suites instead of normal staterooms have their own dining rooms, the Princess and Queen grills, where you're allowed to deviate from the menu and order whatever you like. Zimmermann promises they'll make it, as long as they have the ingredients on board.

"People order things Cunard hasn't had on the menu for years, but guests remember it from a previous cruise," Zimmermann said. "When a meal is special, people remember."

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Nostalgia runs deep with a lot of Cunard passengers -- especially those who sailed on the original Queen Mary. That legendary vessel retired from regular passenger service in 1967 after 1,001 crossings of the Atlantic.

I crashed a reunion of previous Queen Mary guests during my QM2 cruise. Many of them had photos and souvenirs from their past voyages. A few folks got teary-eyed recalling their stories.

"It was the most famous ship in the world," said Anders Tuxen, 78, of Denmark. He and his new bride boarded the Queen Mary in 1954 for a trip that ultimately ended in Chicago, where he had a Fulbright scholarship to study pharmacology.

A woman from Atlanta showed me an old menu she saved from a Queen Mary voyage 52 years earlier. She was only 6 months old at the time. She and her Scottish mother sailed on the Queen Mary to their new home in America.

Getting that first glimpse of the U.S. shore after days spent on the ocean -- it's a memory shared by millions of immigrants, my father included. That view was the carrot on the stick that roused me out of bed at the unholy hour of 4 a.m. the last day of the cruise. I wanted to watch as we pulled into New York's harbor.

Plenty of passengers had the same idea. We gathered on deck in the chilly, pre-dawn air. When the QM2 slowly crept under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, we looked in disbelief as her regal funnels missed the bridge's bottom by just a few feet.

In the distance glowed the Statue of Liberty, a fitting welcome home from an epic voyage.

Cunard Line's fleet still has two queens sailing the seas: Queen Mary 2, the flagship for transatlantic crossings, and Queen Victoria, which went into service in 2007.
The cruise line also is building a new ocean liner, Queen Elizabeth, scheduled to make its maiden voyage in autumn of 2010.
Two retired queens -- Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth 2 -- no longer ply the waters but they're still around:
QUEEN MARYThis floating Art Deco masterpiece and World War II troopship ended her sailing days in 1967 and is now a 314-room hotel in Long Beach, Calif. People can take tours of this historic ocean liner, eat at one of the ship's three restaurants or spend the night in an original cabin. Nightly rates start at $119; (562) 435-3511, queenmary.com.
QUEEN ELIZABETH 2After 40 years at sea, Queen Elizabeth 2 late last year arrived in Dubai, where she's supposed to start her new life as a luxury hotel. Cunard sold QE2 to the state-run conglomerate Dubai World for about $100 million. Plans call for transforming the ship into a hotel/entertainment complex moored in the Persian Gulf off Dubai's artificial palm-shaped island. Speculation about whether these lofty plans will come to fruition has increased in recent months, as the global economic crisis has forced Dubai to scale back some of its most ambitious projects; nakheel.com.