The Queen Mary 2 Is the Last Great Transatlantic Ocean Liner

For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why anyone would take an ocean liner. Look what happened in the movies. Shelley Winters walks gaily up a gangway (The Poseidon Adventure) and the next thing you know she’s swimming through the ballroom of a ship turned upside down. Passengers on the Britannic book a jolly holiday (Juggernaut) and, faster than you can say “lifeboat,” discover there are bombs below deck. Or try this: Kate Winslet is a snooty debutante in first class who falls for a poor artist in steerage (Titanic). Things look promising for the star-crossed pair until … well, cue the iceberg.

Ill-fated love, terrorists, con men—like the grand hotels that were also once staples of cinema and stage, ocean liners are reliable backdrops for every cliché known to the machinery of melodrama. “Being in a ship,” as the English writer Samuel Johnson once remarked, “is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.”

What Dr. Johnson could not have predicted, however, is how an ocean liner would one day prove to be a bastion of luxury—a rarefied and little-appreciated means of getting from here to there. As it happens, this has never been truer than now, when the scores of ocean liners that once plied the seas between New York City and Southampton, England, have dwindled to a solitary vessel: the Queen Mary 2.

Of course, you can fly to England in five hours, but that is not the point. The point is taking the time to relish the passage. The point is to slow the pace so each day is something more than a temporal framework for a never-ending list of tasks. The point is to prove that the physicists were right: time is elastic. There is no valid reason for going through life feeling like a rubber band ready to snap. 

That, anyway, was my thinking when, one sweltering July day, I summoned an Uber to whisk me from my apartment in Manhattan to Pier 12 at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. There I found uniformed attendants—the staff were attired in an impressive array of garments, including jumpsuits worn by dockhands and the crisp nautical garb of senior officers—standing by to check me in. My bags were then hoisted onto number-coded trolleys that presumably would find their way to my stateroom. 

It was my considerable good fortune to be booked into a Queens Grill suite, the equivalent of first class. One perk of this status was bypassing a check-in scrum that called to mind the intake hall at Ellis Island. Simply by flashing a barcode on my smartphone, I was whisked through customs and onto a gangway, waved through the bowels of the ship, and guided to the generically grand Grand Lobby. From there, I was directed to the Kings Court buffet, where my fellow passengers and I would sit through a requisite safety drill before being shown to our cabins. Although it was barely past noon, I felt the need to order a glass of Chablis. Taking a chair near a window, I cast my eye on a parade of excited strangers—the people with whom, for the next seven days, I would be sharing this 1,132-foot vessel. 

Who among them, I wondered, would shoulder me aside to reach a lifeboat? Which is the unstoppable windbag destined to monopolize conversation at breakfast? Where, among the roughly 2,450 passengers and 1,249 officers and crew members, would I encounter a cinematic life story? I thought about these things, and also about the relief I felt, after having just published a memoir, at being able to escape the demands of contemporary book publishing and disappear from the grid for seven glorious days. 

Inevitably, I also found myself thinking about the last time I spent so much time out of reach of land. One summer afternoon back in the 1970s, I boarded a very different kind of vessel. I’d been invited by a yachtsman friend to join his crew aboard a 45-foot sloop, built by the venerable Sparkman & Stephens, to sail from Three Mile Harbor in New York to Labrador, Canada. There were five of us: one woman and four men, including the captain—a man so meticulously old-fashioned he navigated by taking daily sextant readings. 

While the two voyages could not have been more dissimilar, they shared a common route along the Eastern Seaboard, up to the Gulf of Maine. Instead of continuing north to Canada, as we did back then, the Queen Mary 2 would rev up its two 30-megawatt gas turbines and head east to England via the frigid North Atlantic. During the golden age of ocean liners in the early 20th century, dozens of vessels plied these sea-lanes. In those days, the sailings were cause for celebration: I can vividly remember accompanying my parents to the Cunard pier on the Hudson River to see relatives and friends off at bon voyage parties, jolly events featuring wicker picnic hampers and the clinking of flutes of champagne. 

This may be the place to note that I had sailed on the QM2 once before, as a reporter joyriding on a trial run in 2003, before the ship was christened by Queen Elizabeth II. (Cunard, despite having been acquired by Carnival a quarter-century ago, remains the most British of companies, and clings to a storied heritage implicit in the names of English monarchs emblazoned on its vessels.) On that trip we powered out of Southampton and spent two eventless nights at sea before looping back to port. What I best remember is running into chef Daniel Boulud, who had been hired to create signature menus for Cunard—a collaboration not much longer-lived than the trip itself. 

Menus have shifted since I took that voyage, and a ship that took 3,000 craftspeople an estimated 8 million hours to build has also been redesigned and redecorated from stem to stern. At some point a splash pool was removed to make space for extra staterooms, glass-walled elevators were furloughed, and kennels were expanded to accommodate 24 dogs (cats are also welcome), although just 18 canine travelers were aboard on my voyage. These included two strapping Irish setters, whose owner was relocating to London for work and did not want to risk shipping her pets as airborne cargo.

Despite its cosmetic glow-up, the essentials of the seagoing colossus remain basically unaltered. Major public rooms occupy the lower levels, with passenger decks stacked above—a fact that held no particular meaning for me until I realized how the ship’s stratified social order is subtly enforced by this design. While Queens and Princess Grill passengers dine in small, well-staffed, and sumptuously appointed restaurants, the majority of the shipboard population takes its meals at the buffet or on a lower deck in the vast Britannia Restaurant. 

Staterooms are similarly hierarchical. Mine was substantial and came with a king-size bed, a spacious balcony, a lima-bean-shaped desk, an easy chair, a full bath, and many service perks—as well as a closet that seemed far too large, until I unpacked all the “smart attire’’ required for evening meals. Dress-up, of course, is a traditional element of ocean voyaging. The theme of an evening gala on my trip was “Roaring Twenties.’’ Someday I will figure out where my fellow voyagers unearthed all those gangster suits and feathered aigrettes. 

Or not. What matters, it quickly became clear, was that the one thing everyone could indulge in was the ease of slow travel. When I say slow, I should qualify the observation by noting that the QM2 moves at a brisk 26 knots (or about 30 miles an hour). Considering the ship is three times the length of a football field, that is rocket pace. Still, being conveyed across the surface of the planet in sync with the cycles of the day, and the movement of the tides, is an experience radically different from the bodily insult that is commercial air travel today. 

For seven days and eight nights, I luxuriated in the stately movement of the ship, and the feeling that I had voluntarily excommunicated myself from the world. Yes, there was Wi-Fi. Yes, I maintained a semblance of my work life. Yes, I scrolled. Yet as it gradually dawned on me how leisurely and long a day can be, I began slowly to relinquish my more compulsive work habits and—of all the unexpected things—relax. 

That’s not to suggest there was a lack of shipboard activities, should I have wished to partake. Like most cruise ships, the QM2 is designed as a boredom-fighting machine. There are miles of public hallways to explore, huge public spaces in which to indulge in people-watching. There is a casino. There is a shopping arcade. There is an Olde England–style pub and a champagne bar. There is a nightclub and a planetarium. There is a full-service spa and swimming pools of varying sizes on different decks. There is an upper-deck room near the bow where card sharks can hole up playing contract bridge for the entire trip. There are restaurants serving both the endless buffet meals that are one of the enduring tropes of cruising, and “fine-dining” options with appointment seating and pricey à la carte add-ons like lobster and filet mignon.

The library was stocked with 8,000 volumes of Everyman Classics and airport pulp. I had hauled along a bag of hardbound books, but could have saved myself the overweight charge. I checked out Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust to reread, as well as a ghoulish history of famous shipwrecks. 

Briefly, I tried convincing myself to take part in sedentary activities like bingo, afternoon trivia, and high tea, but I could not surmount the Golden Girls associations. One morning I stumbled into the planetarium and found myself unexpectedly entranced by a lecture on black holes given by Dan Wilkins, a guest speaker. Another time I sneaked onto the balcony of the 1,100-seat Royal Court Theater to watch my friend, the biographer Brad Gooch, talk about the artist Keith Haring, the subject of his new biography. Though Brad was his usual charming self—equal parts professorial and conspiratorial—I could not quite shake the strangeness of being surrounded by a bunch of white-haired retirees while hearing anecdotes about a renegade queer graffiti artist from 1980s New York. 

This is probably the place to confess that the greater percentage of my time aboard the QM2 was spent doing nothing. Fresh off book publication and after working nonstop for close to five years, what appealed to me most was having time to stare out to sea and empty my head. Where better to do this than on a vessel where the farthest you can venture is a loop around the promenade deck? 

For the first day or so, dense fog kept me confined to my cabin or to a lounge chair in the library. Then the sun broke through, and I developed a routine that I kept up for the rest of the voyage. After an early breakfast of poached eggs on toast, which I find impossible to order anymore in Manhattan, I would set out on my peregrinations around the big ship. I enjoyed the routine in part because my coveted window table was adjacent to that of a sharply intelligent widow in her 80s who kept up her end of a polite conversation throughout the voyage. 

Prowling the layered decks and hallways, I became a voyeur: peering through stateroom doors left ajar for cleaning; inventing narratives to explain the 12 pieces (I counted) of Globe-Trotter luggage one passenger brought, the dream catcher another hung on her door, the cabins that looked like the aftermath of a rave, and those so obsessively tidy it was hard to believe they were even occupied.

Then I would hide out in my handsomely appointed stateroom, lolling on its broad private balcony and gazing at the limitless ocean. That, after all, was what had compelled me to take this cruise in the first place.

I also partook of the onboard luxuries that draw people to premium class. I found it amusing when the liveried butler showed up at sunset with champagne and caviar canapés. Yes, it was good theater when the fussy maître d’ theatrically swept me to my seat and offered off-menu delicacies (more of the aforementioned caviar). And the good French wine available at a modest surcharge on my “beverage plan” was entirely welcome. 

Keeping a respectful distance, I also enjoyed the conversational company of my shipmates, who I found unusually mindful of social boundaries. These mealtime companions were people of varied professions: a British magistrate and his solicitor wife; an archetypal Texan rancher couple who looked like extras from the classic movie Giant; and my recently widowed seatmate. This woman, I learned over the course of the voyage, was on her way to take a second cruise, through the Norwegian fjords. The voyage had been long-planned with her spouse of many decades. When he died just months before embarkation (and after the couple had lost their beloved California Wine Country ranch to wildfire), she decided to set out on her own. “I haven’t taken a trip by myself since I got married,’’ she said, adding briskly: “It was time.’’

If there was a common thread among those I encountered on board the Queen Mary 2, it was the tacit agreement not to overshare. Just as passengers kindly stepped aside to let one another pass in the long corridors, those I met tended to skirt the messy particulars of their lives. This felt therapeutic, an antidote to the toxic diet of overly personal information that we are fed daily by our phones. And it allowed me to indulge a luxury that is not hyped in travel brochures or Instagram stories: as the immense vessel powered along through an illimitable and indifferent ocean, I was temporarily free to relinquish the illusion of controlling fate’s direction. For once in my frenetic life, I could let go and float. 

Transatlantic sailings on the Queen Mary 2 from $1,350 per person.

A version of this story first appeared in the August 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Long Live the Queen.”