LA LA Land

THE CITY of ANGELS ? How unlikely is that?

What is there to be said about Los Angeles? Smog? Traffic? The movies? Mudslides? Wildfires? Earthquakes (“the Big One”)? I guess it’s all of the above, and most of it is not pleasant. They do have Kobe Bryant though…and Joe Friday worked here on DRAGNET…just the facts Ma’am.

The late comedian Fred Allen (a Bostonian, I might add) once said that LA was, “a nice place to live if you happen to be an orange.” With regard to Hollywood, Oscar Levant said that “when you strip away the tinsel, you find more tinsel.” OK, that’s enough about Los Angeles…we’ve been out here many times before and it’s just too much of a zoo for our tastes. I’m sure we’ll come back here every once in awhile, but not for vacationing…most likely we’ll come to go to the track at Del Mar or Santa Anita.

Today our ship is docked at the harbor in Long Beach. We’re sort of doing a local after leaving Seattle to pick up the remainder of our fellow passengers before we set out across the South Pacific. Just a hundred yards or so from us is the original Queen Mary. At one time she was once the world’s largest ocean liner. She made her maiden voyage in 1936 and was named after Queen Elizabeth’s grandmother, the wife of George the Fifth. Many famous people crossed trans-Atlantic on the Queen, including Winston Churchill, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Greta Garbo, and Fred Astaire, and during World War II, the ship was converted to use by the military as troop carrier for the “Greatest Generation.” Back in the late ‘50’s as a teenager, I had seen the Queen Mary at her berth in New York along the Hudson River. In about 1970, on one of the occasions I had to come out here to visit ships at the old Long Beach Naval Shipyard, I had the opportunity to go on board the Queen Mary before she was completely converted to a hotel. To say the least, I was very impressed. That was a few years before I ever caught the ocean traveling bug. That day when I was in Long Beach, onboard walking around the ship, I looked out a port hole onto the boat deck, and filling my view was this brilliant red head of hair. It was Lucille Ball shooting a promo film for some cause or another. That’s what I remember most, even more than the ship itself. However, today I have come to appreciate the ship more…this 1000 foot long “city at sea” is the pride of Long Beach.

The Queen Mary Seaport includes the Queen Mary Seawalk, an eclectic shopping and dining area and right alongside the pier, between it and our dock, is the world’s largest clear-span geodesic dome. This structure once housed Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose, the largest plane ever built. I’m not sure whether or not that record still holds in view of those leviathans of the skies being built these days by Boeing and Airbus. We took some time to get on a free hop on/hop off bus to explore some of the Long Beach waterfront; we stopped at a nearby WAL-Mart for some last minute things we “needed”, and then returned to the AMSTERDAM at a decent time before the sail away at 5:00PM. We wanted to greet some of the boarding passengers that we had met on last year’s Grand Asia-Australia voyage. A theme that HAL has been stressing the last few days is this notion of “Welcome Home.” The cruise director Bruce, the hostess Jacky, their assistants Steve and Lorrie, the Pinnacle (specialty) restaurant manager Kim, and a number of passengers, all remember us and greeted us with big hugs. That all contributes to a kind of WOW factor for this voyage. We reunited with one of our championship trivia team members from last year, Valerie from San Diego, and at the afternoon quiz session today picked up right where we left off. We just missed winning when we failed to get the closest answer to the tie-breaker question, how many tons does the anchor chain on the Queen Mary weigh? In case you ever get asked, the answer is 40 tons.

Tomorrow (Thursday) starts the routine of sea-day activities. I’ve already signed up for the morning watercolor class. Rosemary is going to be doing her thing at “Sit and Knit”…but her friend Cathy she met last year says it’s really “Stitch and Bitch,” and that’s what they’ve decided to call it, no matter what the ship publishes in the daily program. The food is good, the drinks are honest, the string quartet at dinner in the dining room is soothing, the sea air is invigorating, and we’re looking for the ship to get out there in the deeper water so we can start to feel that old rock and roll over the waves…there’s too many people out on deck now and we have to get them seasick so they will stay in their cabins more.

In any event, we are finally leaving Collie-fornia (as Arnold calls it) and Los Angeles, this circus without a tent. We’ll return here again on December 2nd, when our voyage comes to an end. - RBM

Sep 30, 2009

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