A Week At Sea Aboard The Last Ocean Liner

The Queen Mary 2 keeps a romantic age of transatlantic sailing alive.

This summer, I made a voyage from New York to England in the only remaining passenger ship of its kind: the Queen Mary 2.

Cunard’s flagship promises to be exceptional. The luxury cruise line’s website lavishes the vessel with praise: “sumptuous,” “legendary,” “astonishing.” YouTube is full of breathless videos about its glamour and romance, hearkening to the golden days of ocean travel.

It’s technically an ocean liner, not a cruise ship — which is how I rationalized the $2,000 ticket.

For centuries, the transatlantic passage was life-changing for millions of travelers — including the immigrants and enslaved people who made the perilous journey. By the 19th century, it had become fairly reliable thanks to steam engines, which quickly ushered in an era of ocean liners, each grander than the last. But the ocean was still vast and willful, and each crossing felt like a small victory against an ancient, behemoth force.

I found myself seduced by the idea. I was going to sail more than 3,000 miles to a new continent and experience the true immensity of the act. I felt ready — I had already crossed America by train.

This was going to be inspiring, profound. Like the Titanic, I was destined for greatness at sea.

About 30 hours later, stuffed with buffet food, seated heavily in plush velvet chairs and watching lithe dancers performing “Be Our Guest” in tight spandex and even tighter smiles, I already found my spirit flagging.

A luxury liner designed to entertain thousands of passengers is nothing like an intimate train car on an aging rail system. It’s designed to be, well, a cruise — with the peculiar kind of dull, aching restlessness that accompanies a life stripped of all friction and responsibility.

So, for seven days, unmoored in the high seas, I slowly lost my mind.

On a searing July day, I took a car about 10 minutes from my apartment to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. In spectacularly unsexy fashion, I fell victim to an online U.K. visa scam while in line to board, and I missed all the grand welcomes while trying to sort out my hiccup.

By the time I was done dealing with my credit card company, we had started pulling away. I watched the Statue of Liberty disappear into the distance.

The Queen Mary 2 is indeed special: It is the largest ocean liner ever built and the most expensive. It weighs three times what Titanic did and cost nearly $1 billion to build. It has four stabilizers (each weighing 70 tons), four diesel engines and two marine gas turbines, which allow it to cross the Atlantic Ocean about 20 times a year, often through stormy winter swells and rough seas.

My fellow passengers often remarked that the QM2 was the smoothest ship they had ever been on. A woman named Pam recounted to me over dinner how she once sailed on her through a hurricane.

With all that gross tonnage (nearly 150,000 tons), what exactly does the Queen Mary 2 have on it? By my count, it had:

Like all cruises, the Queen Mary 2 promised a fantasy world where you could live your idealized life on the seas. The main difference between the QM2 and a regular cruise was that there was no getting off the ship.

The QM2 does not stop anywhere during its transatlantic crossing.

In other words, there was no escape.

Perhaps you are wondering what kind of person opts for a transatlantic ocean liner over a plane in the year 2025. I wondered the same thing, so I asked (or eavesdropped).

(This diva became one of my regular trivia partners.)

(This was a fun quirk of transatlantic crossing: nearly every day, at noon, we were directed to set our clocks one hour ahead. The reference locations we were given were, in order: Buenos Aires, South Georgia, Cape Verde, Reykjavik, London.)

(The most exclusive place on board the QM2 was the kennel, which was open to pet owners only.)

(Death — or the specter of it — had a big presence on the ship. Passengers often spoke of friends and spouses who had passed. Titanic death tolls adorned the walls. And, for me personally, staring into the abyssal ocean every night, it was impossible not to think about death.)

In my observations, the average Queen Mary 2 enjoyer was 75-ish, retired, traveling as a couple, and White. Most of the people I spoke to had sailed on the QM2 before. Many were longtime fans of Cunard. Almost none were first-time cruisers. Some had even sailed in the original Queen Mary, which is now retired in Long Beach, California.

You may have deduced that I (30-ish, in grad school, traveling alone, unmistakably Asian) did not fit the demographic norm.

This played out about how you’d expect it to vis-à-vis off-color jokes and overall weird stuff people said to me. This also meant I spent a week getting really into activities typically associated with people a few generations ahead of me.

In an effort to feel some modicum of control as I pitched across the open ocean in a small city-state, I decided to structure my days around trivia. I went twice, sometimes thrice a day. My schedule looked a little like this:

At trivia, I got very good at shamelessly joining teams. Eventually, people started to recognize me, which gave me a small sense of accomplishment.

I was actually pretty bad at Queen Mary 2 trivia.

Most of the questions were curated for the older crowd, which meant many head-scratchers about the ’60s and ’70s. But occasionally, I got to shine: in matters of art (“Who painted the Persistence of Memory?”), pop music (“Who sang ‘Party in the USA’?”), and …

To quote a meme I once saw, I felt like I was on loan from the British Museum.

Something I find really weird about cruises is that people get very dressed up for them. I learned the hard way that QM2 takes their formal gala nights very seriously.

Fortunately I packed a few sundresses, which allowed me to just barely skirt into formal territory. The two gala themes were, respectively: Red and Gold and Roaring ’20s. I couldn’t recall receiving any communication about the galas, but clearly I had missed something.

At first, it all had the distinct, mildly amusing feeling of being at a cosplay convention or a Renaissance fair. Later, reflecting upon the darkening sea, I felt less generous.

There was something so uncanny and specious about a ship full of moneyed White Brits and Americans reenacting the golden days of the 1920s, eating steak and lobster while being waited on by an army of attendants from the Global South.

That halcyon period never actually ended: the anachronistic fantasy they longed for was real and right in front of them. I wondered whether the server at our table missed his family.

Much of the frenetic, perspiring programming on board seems to have one overarching purpose: to help you forget you’re on a ship in the middle of the ocean. To help you forget that you hang suspended over a universe of life, death, decay, rebirth. That the closest bit of land is 8,200 feet underneath you, at the bottom of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. That you hover at the precipice of the abyss.

But I could not forget.

I mean, wasn’t that the whole point? To gaze into it?

In the evening, I beheld the ocean.

One night, I witnessed the most devastating sunset of my life. There were only two dozen others there to see it.

One night, a thunderstorm rolled in around us, and I watched lightning bore into the sea.

One night, as I watched the horizon disappear into an inky wash, I finally understood the term “nautical twilight.” Gazing out into the pitch black, I could not differentiate sky from sea.

The Atlantic is calm in the summer, and the swells are gentle. The QM2 rocks languidly. At night, laying in bed with the ambient noise of the ocean, you are lulled into a sleep that I can only describe as primordial, womblike.

At sea, the days and nights blend together. Time feels gooey and immaterial, non-Newtonian. I teeter between human time and geologic time.

Here I am in the heart of the ocean that split Pangea 150 million years ago. Trivia is at 2:30 p.m. in the Carinthian Lounge.

When I wasn’t eating, playing trivia or pondering my mortality, time passed in a blur of activities.

By the end of my voyage, I knew a few things.

I knew aft from forward and port from starboard. I knew that the scopolamine patches I wore for seasickness gave me cottonmouth and that the tap water on board wasn’t potable.

I knew that sticky toffee pudding shouldn’t be cold and that the British ladies at my dinner table would spend a whole hour complaining about it.

I knew I could order two appetizers at dinner.

I had exhausted what wisdom the QM2 had to offer me. It was time to go.

On my last day, I felt mostly relieved — but also oddly sentimental.

I had spent my week on the QM2 among people I could not always relate to, who often seemed bewildered at my presence. But on the whole, folks were nice to me, even if they were kind of weird about it. I had eaten well — very well. And I had gotten to stand underneath an iridescent full moon in the middle of the dark sea, stunned into near incoherence.

As we pulled into English Channel and I saw the soft contours of land for the first time, I thought: Maybe it wasn’t that bad to lose your mind in the middle of the ocean.