Day 9, Sailing toward New York City

Our final day at sea started out with blue skies and warmer temperatures.   Tropical Storm Hermine was still swirling off New York City and the Captain had forecast we might encounter 30 knot winds and heavier seas later in the day. As the day wore on, we never did encounter much weather and thankfully, the forecasts for much worse weather never materialized.

A “Glimpse of a Ship’s Galley” was on the schedule for 10:30 in the Britannia Restaurant. We have been on many galley tours on various ships over the years. While they are similar in most respects, there are always some differences and we enjoy meeting some of the crew and getting to learn more about their routine. Typically we find these tours quite popular and pretty crowded. So when we arrived a few minutes late, we were surprised to find that there were only 50 people or so crowded around one of the Chefs who had just started speaking near the entrance to the lower level of the Britannia.

After the Chef gave us a brief overview of the galley along with some interesting factoids such as how many meals are served each day we filed into the main galley and followed a loop starting on the port side and winding around to our exit on the starboard side. Along the way we learned that every restaurant has its own galley, including room service. I was surprised to learn that the Princess Grill and Queens Grill although side by side, still maintain separate galleys.

Fashion week events continued with a conversation between Colin McDowell and Fern Mallis. Fern displayed the shawl she was wearing that was covered with emoji caricatures of celebrities from the fashion industry. She mentioned that she purchased this at a store in Manhattan (Chelsea) called “Story” – more HERE

We really enjoyed the food in the Golden Lion Pub so we stopped by again after the Colin/Fern discussion in the Royal Court Theatre. They don’t start serving food until noon. We arrived a few minutes early and had to wait for a bit before putting in our orders. The place was swamped with orders right when they opened, so we had to wait about 20 minutes to get our food. It was worth the wait as the food was very good. Judy ordered the fish and chips and I ordered the steak, mushroom and onion pie.

There were 2 fashion shows held during the QM2 fashion week, the first was by Zandra Rhodes and we commented on that earlier. The second show, which we saw today, was by students from the Royal College of the Arts. Each show was presented twice. We missed the first presentation of the students show, but we were able to attend the second show which was held in the Queens Room today at 2 pm.

We arrived about 30 minutes before the doors opened as we wanted to get one of the best seats on the elevated section with a direct line of sight down the runway. We learned from our first experience that the front row seats directly on the runway were reserved for press and VIPS, but the other seats off the main floor were first come first serve and we felt that they were actually preferable.

There were 5 students presenting and each would display 4 “looks” as I learned that is the name for each outfit that would be shown. We enjoyed the show and it was fun to see what types of outfits the students created. I am not much of a fashion critic, but here are a few pictures that will speak for themselves.

After the show we headed up to the Terrace Pool to check out the weather, which was surprisingly nice but windy.

Stephani Parker was the headliner tonight in the Royal Court Theatre. The show this evening was at 7pm instead of 10:30 and was kicked off by the Cunard Singers and Dancers for a single 7 minute number followed by a new 30 minute show by Stephani. Her first show featured Whitney Houston songs exclusively while tonight’s show included songs from a variety of artists including Lionel Richey, Michael Jackson and others.

Our final dinner was wonderful and our group all bade farewell until we may meet again.

The remainder of our evening was spent packing and getting ready for our arrival in NYC in the morning.