On Land

 Our time on the Queen Mary 2 was running out. It was over. I woke up real early around 4 am on this last morning before leaving the ship. I looked for lights of the city but the only ones I could see were far off. It was foggy and raining.

I brewed up some instant coffee. It was all that remained, the coffee press had gone with the luggage and was somewhere below.

The reason to get up early was New York harbor, the Liberty Statue, and to watch the ship go under the Verrazano- Narrows bridge.

My traveling compadre and myself rallied up to the open deck 7 and were surprised to see so many ship mates standing in the rain or crowded under the sheltered areas. There wasn’t much to see in the dark and rain, and it seemed we were still far away from the harbor.  We did the only sensible thing we could think of and that was to go into the buffet restaurant and watch out the windows.

My traveling compadre spotted it first, and we made a dash to get some snapshots

 Verrazano- Narrows Bridge

It was still  raining hard and the water on the lens made for some interesting distortion, but it was well worth watching the ship pass under the bridge with just a few meters to spare.

The Liberty statue remained elusive in the fog and rain, but I soon discovered the perfect view of the statue was right off my stateroom balcony, except the fog was not real helpful in getting the perfect shot of the grand lady.

Liberty

The harbor, and the New York skyline remained shrouded in rain and fog for all the time we had left to look at it from our stateroom balcony.

New York

The bags were where they should have been, the wait for seeing an actual custom agent one to one was not all that long, and I even got another stamp in my passport. Who knew oil companies with huge military’s like amerika’s even stamped passports for free.

Not Exactly A Passport Stamp

Myself and shipmates that I never saw on the entire crossing gathered at a motor coach in the rain for the ride to JFK airport. The driver Mark sorted the luggage according to the terminal we needed to be at, and soon we were on the motorway. Our driver like his counterpart Marco in Naples liked to sound the carriages horn, in friendly greeting to the other motorists.

After about an hour’s time we neared the airport, and Mark explained over the loudspeaker which airline was at which terminal. Apparently, there are 9 or so terminals and the coach wouldn’t fit into terminal 2 so those people had to get off at 3 and somehow get back to where they needed to be, but I was lucky as I only needed to go to terminal 8.

TWA's JFK Terminal

The airport is laid out so that after each stop Mark had to drive the coach all the way out of the airport then come in the entrance and select the road that went to the corresponding terminal. This process took almost as long as driving to the airport, and after riding in the bus for at least two hours I was excited to get off and wait to be crammed into an Airbus for the 6-hour ride to the other coast.

Lockheed Constellation

I did finish a good book waiting for my ride and the west coast.