We start by walking back into town, Long Beach, to scratch one of those “must do” itches we get sometimes. When visiting America we always need to get breakfast just once at Denny’s – yes I know it’s fast food but a Slammer has just got to be had once in a while, and it has been nearly ten years! Hubby has French toast and I have cinnamon pancakes.
Afterwards we waddle across the road to Walgrens and stock up on various sundries we need, slightly bemused by the classical music (a Bach fugue as we enter and Strauss Senior’s Radetzky March as we leave) blasting from speakers all round the outside of the store – we work out this is an anti-vagrancy ploy, which is so very wrong on several levels!
We walk back through town enjoying the art deco post office and very modern theatre before visiting the actual long beach that gives Long Beach its current name (it was previously called Wilmore City.) This beach is seven miles long, on our 2013 visit we walked its length to visit Naples, a gorgeous little area at the other end with fabulous houses surrounded by canals, and prices to match the exclusivity.
This time we’re content to walk back via the marina area where we had dinner last night, and then via our hotel towards Queen Mary. It’s amazing to see how beautiful this ship looks, recently painted and in stark contrast to the USSR submarine Skorpion that is now a rust-bucket and no longer open to visitors.
The walk around the Los Angeles River is very pretty and we enjoy the sunshine and pelicans fishing. A view back to Queen Mary contrasts the 1929 ship with an adjacent modern liviathan soon to embark on a four-night booze-cruise to the Mexico Riviera dwarfing her.
Our taxi arrives promptly and we’re whisked over to the other side of the enormous second-largest container port in America to the new cruise terminal, where we are rapidly checked in and embarking Odyssey. Within minutes we’re in our cabin and unpacking.
Whilst Hubby unpacks I’m applying for our NZeTA, the formal documentation needed to enter New Zealand. Hubby’s arrives instantly, mine still hasn’t 36 hours later so maybe I’ll have to stay onboard to Sydney?
We head up to the pool and get our first champagne and burger, another one of those essential Itches we have to scratch, and of course it’s all excellent. We check into our muster station (lifeboat assembly point) and also book some speciality dining.
Then it’s a lazy afternoon swimming until it’s sailaway party time, so we go back up a floor (lest we get dragged into a dance) to look down over the singer and band perform as we leave LA, and chat with more fellow guests, some of whom we’ve travelled with before.
Shower, dress for dinner then head to Patio Bar for an aperitif and then descend four decks to the Main Dining Room (MDR) which seems very quiet.
An embarrassing moment when the restaurant manager assigns us a window table only for an elderly couple to claim it – we aquiece, there are plenty of other tables, and it’s dark outside anyway so a window is pointless. Later we see quite a palaver between the staff members involved, one wonders who’s head will roll?
Dinner is good, we enjoy pear salad and lamb chops, curried prawns and beef fillet, and both have the lava cake. After dinner we catch the fabulous pianist Roy Tan whom we met up the Amazon in March.
