The Queen Mary

So before I get to writing about Hawaii and Seattle I wanted to make sure I posted about the end of last semester as I'm trying not to miss out any adventures we've had. In the two weeks before we went our separate ways for Christmas we tried to fit in as much as we could amongst all our finals. On the second to last weekend some of us went to visit the Queen Mary, one of Long Beach's main attractions.

Before doing a tour we had time to explore the ship ourselves, so we went on deck and up to the bridge. We had great weather for the day out, which was a nice surprise after seeing a bad report for that day. Weather like that never gets old, even after living in it for 4 months! It was kind of cold but I don't mind if its sunny!

Titanic-esque pose:

On the bridge:

Exploring:

Downtown Long Beach:

As the Queen Mary is supposedly haunted we did a tour of the ship, on which we were told "true" stories of the ship's ghostly history. The old swimming pool is one of the places that is thought to be most haunted, especially by a little girl. It wasn't too scary, we survived! The ship was also used in the war for carrying thousands of soldiers so there were a lot of deaths onboard as a result of wounds, disease and other unrelated illnesses. It would have been very crowded, in fact the swimming pool was even filled with bunk beds for the soldiers.

We went further into the depths of the ship and saw the engine rooms. We were told some more spooky stories about people who had died down there, and of a person on a tour who had once captured a photo of what appeared to be smoke approaching the tour guide. Steph made the guide recreate the situation by encouraging him to stand in the spot to see if anything happened while we clicked away with our cameras. Of course nothing happened!

When we finished the tour it was dark and a few of us decided to stay and look around some more. It was great to see the ship's lights at night and also to see the view of downtown Long Beach.

Relaxing on deck:

We were surprised to find out that the Titanic was smaller than the Queen Mary as it seemed small, and you imagine Titanic to have been so much bigger, probably because of how it is shown in the movie! The ship is definitely worth a visit when in Long Beach!

On my recent trip to Seattle I think I was told that some relatives had travelled from England to America on the Queen Mary which has made my trip there even more interesting, and it seems like such a coincidence that I chose to come to Long Beach now.

My next blog post is about our hike up to the Hollywood sign!