After looking and booking several different cruises for my 60th birthday which included a stay in Europe and trip back on QM2, I decided to save a little money and do the roundtrip Belgian escape from NTC (Red Hook Brooklyn). This had the advantage of allowing my wife, Jill and I to drive in to CT early and visit my Father, sister and cousins prior to the cruise.

Saturday before the cruise was nonstop rain, something we would not see again until May 31st when we debarked back in Red hook. We had a car service take us to the pier from my cousin’s house in Queens Village. The driver was very talkative and it was a fun drive. We were dropped off around 10:15 which was earlier than we planned but traffic was good, our experience with New York is if you want to be on time plan for traffic, if you don’t you’re late, if you do plan, you may be real early.

For this day early was a problem. This was Queen Mary 2’s first return to the US for a number of months and so the US Coast Guard had to inspect the ship prior to passengers boarding. This wasn’t a huge issue but it was a lot of hurry up and waits. We had Queens Grill suite so we were in a lounge with scones and treats etc., but the plan was it wouldn’t be long. We could see the people at check in just goofing off and talking since they couldn't process anybody on. They had a good time being paid to do nothing, and by nothing, I mean they didn’t start the computers, log on or anything until we were lined up to check in and then they had problems logging on. If they had logged on while waiting, they most likely would have found the problem and corrected it before it wasted the passenger’s time, but not the case. Therefore Cunard gets graded down for this. Read more