folks ... luxurious as the QM2 appears
... to me, at least, it'll never compete with the sheer elegance of the original Queen Mary.
Berthed as a 'floating museum' at the LA suburb of Long Beach Calfornia since 1967, this magnificent liner had been launched on Clydeside 33 years earlier - and "boasted" such illustrious passengers as King Edward VIII [later Duke of Windsor] Wallis Simpson (whom he'd renounced the throne to marry) and the future Sir Winston Churchill, to name but three. My dad had told me as a kid, how he'd been among the thousands present to watch her pass gracefully down the slipway at John Brown's Shipyard in 1934, and this subsequently instilled in me a strong desire to see her for myself - an ambition I finally realised in the summer of 1992 - when I visited the West Coast of America.
