Cunard
You don't have to be old to like this theme cruise…you just have to like old movies. And if you know who Robert Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz are, you probably qualify. For those who don't, Osborne (prime time) and Mankiewicz (daytime weekends) are the hosts of Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel that caters to [...]
It's not easy buying a tux. It's not easy wearing a tux, or so I'm told. The tuxedo-wearing man I live, cruise and do everything with is no easy study, either. I could count the times in four decades that he's worn one. On my fingers. One hand. No, not even on our wedding day. [...]
How long, somebody was asking us the other day, have you been "Mac people"? How long is forever? It was a high school teacher who introduced us to the world of Apple. If only the people at Cunard had met Gordon DeVito when we did. By our estimation, it was at least 20 years ago [...]
If we didn’t know better, we’d say with just a drip of sarcasm that the reason it took Cunard 172 years to do weddings on their ships, it’s because they wanted to get it right. The real reason, however, is that British law prohibited weddings on British ships. When one of its stablemates, Carnival, had [...]
On the weekend, we came across a story about “gentlemen hosts” on cruise ships. These are “jobs” for single men who pay $30 a day to go and have a good time on a cruise, with no romantic liaisons allowed. In other words, they have to be, well, gentlemen. The Gentleman Host Program and others [...]
“We are committed to Southampton as our main base, but Liverpool is our spiritual home.” Those are the words of Peter Shanks, Cunard’s President, after word leaked in the Liverpool Daily Post that the Queen Mary 2 may — that’s “may” — start sailing from Liverpool to New York on a one-off, sporadic basis. The [...]
Vanity, thy name is photography. Let us begin by pointing out that we take hundreds — no, thousands — of pictures. We’re not even in all of them! But the idea of getting our pictures…oops, portraits…done after private consultation, unlimited shoot time, unlimited pictures (portraits) and a photo review is… Maybe we’re just not sophisticated [...]
Here’s a strange cruise item for you. If booked on the Queen Mary 2, passengers can take their dogs on a cruise. They no longer have to be only (or disguised as!!!) service dogs. As people who always took our (late) dog on vacation and who right now are dog-sitting (his name is Max) for [...]
If you have been reading us for a while, you may or may not recall that the longest cruise we’ve been on was 19 days. You may even remember that we liked it, and felt a little melancholy at being separated from our home on the water, the Norwegian Sun. In short, we didn’t think [...]
Maybe there aren’t strange things happening at Cunard, but what’s been happening is “unusual” for sure. A few weeks ago, Cunard floated the idea of changing the registration for one or all of its ships. This was to allow the fancy cruise line to sell “weddings on board” — which isn’t allowed on a British [...]