2024-05-24 – Southampton, UK – Day 022

Friday May 24, 2024 – In Southampton, UK

Today we are once again in the port of Southampton having completed the second leg of a journey on Queen Anne to the Canary islands. This morning there was apparently a lot of confusion. We’re not quite sure exactly why, but there appears to have been issues with the disembarkation of travelers who were on the Canary Islands trip. They kept announcing please those of you with XYZ colored tickets should remain on the ship. I think that everybody was trying to disembark at the same time which caused confusion trying to get the luggage and people off the ship into Coaches, other vehicles or taxis while concurrently trying to get the other people who were trying to get onto the ship for the next part of the voyage all sort of mingling in and out at the same time! From our point of view we had a nice leisurely breakfast aboard and then walked into town from the ship. The Mayflower terminal is maybe a five minute bus ride to this West-Quay shopping mall and takes about 20 to 25 minutes to walk, so we walked there. We went through the mall as we were looking for a barbershop as I needed a haircut, which was successfully accomplished. We were told about another pub called the Red Lion that was well worthwhile going to. It was just past the one that we went to the last time – “The (Weatherspoon) Standing Order” and eventually found it on High Street and thoroughly enjoyed a delicious lunch. The main structure of the building had been built during the Norman period (1050 to 1070) modified during the Tudor era. We had a very good lunch, with a pint of Guinness, but the servings were so big that we had to leave a portion of the food. Anne had Onion Soup and Fish & Chips and I had Mushrooms on toast and Steak & Ale pie, we could only eat maybe 2/3 of it but we enjoyed ourselves. We then walked back to the ship, so all in all during the day we covered a total of 12 1/2 km of walking which has been sort of the average on those days when we are wandering around the town.

Once we were back on the ship we had a cup of tea and looked around as Anne’s sister – Patsy and her husband – David Hubp were joining us for this 2 week “British Isles” segment, having flown in from Mexico a couple days ago. They spent the days in London, then came down to Southampton this morning, using the Cunard Transit Service. We met up with them and they are in they are in the next door cabin (8037). We enjoyed champagne before going down to dinner which we thoroughly enjoyed. We had picked out a table (413) that we wanted which was right by the windows so we could see the departure. After dinner we went to the show which was a really fantastic wind instrument player – Julian Smith. He is an incredible instrumentalist covering Pop, Latin, and Classical music on his saxophone. He really was brilliant and apparently was “found” when he came in second to Susan Boyle in “Britain has Talent” show.