Travel Maven Blog ...... David Molyneaux posts from TheTravelMavens.com

Cunard's Queen Victoria: Sailing around the world on a dinosaur

A gilded ballroom and serious shuffleboard tournaments. A two-story library with 6,000 books. Well dressed gentlemen hosts for single women at the daily afternoon and evening dances. A classical orchestra. Knitting and watercolor classes. Passengers gladly gussied up, in gowns and tuxedos for dinner and their own private boxes at the theater.

Sometimes, as I wandered around the posh new Queen Victoria on her inaugural voyage around the world, I felt as if I were cruising on a floating dinosaur.

Most ships today are built for a new style of cruising, which, like so many personal relationships, is casual and quick. Picture rock-climbing walls and the beat of rock music.

The new Queen Victoria is old world, a 2,000-passenger ship designed for people who crave yesterday's style, cruising as it used to be -- fancy, refined, formal and slow.

Passengers on the Queen's inaugural voyage seemed to love this retro style, at least all of the men and women I talked to during a January seven-night segment of the world cruise, between Aruba and Acapulco.

Me, too. My wife, Judi Dash, and I loved the romance of it all, taking fencing lessons for couples, renewing our wedding vows, listening to a harpist in the lobby, dancing after dinner.

Victoria is the latest of Cunard Line's English ocean queens, following in the wake of two Elizabeths and two Marys. She is a richly appointed, well endowed vessel -- classy, with dark wood trim and cozy with an abundance of nooks for reading, talking, taking tea. The ballroom is grand, the theater the first at sea to have  private boxes that can be rented for an evening, with champagne.

Alas, the Queen also displays an irritating dual personality.  She is an upstairs-downstairs vessel with two environments for dining, depending on your cabin class. This class differentiation, occasionally thrown in your face by ship employees, is bound to irritate some passengers, mostly Americans I suspect. We downstairs folks from the colonies tend to bristle at being treated as lesser, even if we didn't pay as much for the cruise as the gentry upstairs who are lapping up the champagne and caviar.

For the rest of the QUEEN VICTORIA STORY.

Queen Victoria left Southampton, England, on Jan. 6, 2008, on her inaugural world cruise. On Saturday, Feb. 23, she arrived in Sydney, Australia, followed on Sunday by her sister, QE2.

Sunday evening, both ships sailed past Fort Denison, greeting each other with a Whistle Salute. Queen Victoria returns to England April 22. Photo, above, from Cunard Line.

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Molyneaux is editor of TravelMavens.net. CLICK for articles on cruising, Florida, Europe and adventure.

Table talk: Occasional joys in dining with strangers on a cruise

On a trans-Atlantic cruise in October, we were a ship of coffee-drinkers, novel-readers, gamblers, card-players, deck-walkers and nappers. We had boarded the 3,100-passenger Emerald Princess in the Mediterranean, and we were headed across the Atlantic to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Our seven-day ocean journey was about 3,600 miles from Lisbon, Portugal, with a stop in the Azores.

Folks on these Atlantic repositioning cruises -- usually offered in spring and fall between winters in the Caribbean and summers in Europe -- are mostly sea lovers willing to chance the unpredictable ocean weather for the rewards of the laid-back journey, with long days afloat. Besides, the price is good, as low as $70 a day per person (for two) for an inside cabin.

When you cruise, you also take your chances at dinner.

Princess, like most other ships, offers choices: You may sit at the same table in one dining room each evening or you may play the field, showing up for dinner at one of the other dining rooms, allowing the maitre d' to place you, often at a table for eight.

These days, with room service, and all the alternative restaurants aboard the newer ships allowing tables for two, you could hide from your fellow passengers. But I was traveling alone, and after eating by myself at the buffet restaurants at breakfast and lunch, I was ready for company at dinner.

Talking Bay of Pigs and inside cabins

Through the years, I have had good luck and not-so-good luck at cruise ship dinner tables. I have met writers, actors, singers, plumbers, nurses, social workers, sailors, librarians, twins who were a threesome with their cabin mate, and a horse jockey who was half the height of his new wife. Most of my tables on the Emerald Princess brought stimulating conversation, from politics of the 2008 U.S. presidential race to a personal remembrance from the 1961 unsuccessful invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

Two other short conversations stand out:

"We cruise a lot," said a stout woman from Florida, nodding at her quiet husband beside her at dinner one evening when we were still in the Mediterranean. Her husband was sipping weak chamomile tea, on his second cup of water with the same tea bag.

"I don't like being near the water," said the Florida woman, "so we always take a cabin on the upper decks. The bottom decks are too close to the water. And we have an inside cabin. We always take an inside cabin. I don't want to see the water."

You don't meet many people at sea who prefer an inside cabin, which is basically a room with four walls and no windows. But a fellow from Missouri at the same table agreed with the Florida woman.

"We always go inside," he said. "Inside is a better price. My wife and I went outside once, and the sun would wake us in the morning. Inside, you don't know what time it is. Good sleeping."

He didn't describe his home in Missouri; perhaps they live in a basement.

She didn't date, she married

On another evening, a more literary table of strangers was discussing books. Somewhere between the salad and the lamb chops I mentioned "The Liar's Club" by Mary Karr. I said that one of my favorite lines from that book is the tale-tellers description of her mother, who didn't date, she married.

"Sounds like you," said a handsome man in his 80s to his lovely wife.

"I was married a few times," she told the table.

"Yes," said her husband who turned out not to be her husband.

"But we're living in sin," he said with a grin.

More on the trans-Atlantic journey on the Emerald Princess is at TheTravelMavens.com

For information on trans-Atlantic repositioning cruises.

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Molyneaux is editor of TheTravelMavens.com. CLICK for articles on cruising, Florida, Europe and adventure.

Looking for a romantic escape

That man, the one who stabbed my wife repeatedly and who hissed, "Darn, I missed the heart," was I.

I  am guilty as charged in the Dallas Morning News.

If you want to know more, take a look at the travel article on romantic escapes, written just in time for Valentine's Day by Judi Dash.

Spurts of gel: Washing your hands at sea

If you haven't been on a cruise lately, you may have a surprise awaiting when you enter the dining room:  A bottle of gooey gel to sanitize your hands.

Following outbreaks of gastrointestinal illnesses, particularly the norovirus that spread through cruise ships during the past five years, some cruise lines have dipped into the hand-sanitizing business in a big way.

In December, everywhere I turned aboard NCL's new Norwegian Gem, cruising out of New York City, I was greeted with a gel machine for sanitizing my hands -- even at the entrance to the childrens play area, seen at left.

In January, aboard Cunard's Queen Victoria, on an inaugural world cruise full of passengers decked out in gowns and dinner jackets, a waiter guarded every dining room, spurting gel into my hands from a plastic bottle of bacteria killer.

Prasad, maitre d' in Queen Victoria's posh Princess Grill, stands ready, below.

CDC reports cruise ship success

Because cruise passengers are confined to a small area, eat together and touch many of the same surfaces, germs spread easily on a ship. These days, cruise lines frequently scrub every surface. To combat germs, especially the norovirus that causes flu-like symptoms for 48 to 72 hours, they have added sneeze bars over the salads and bread on bufets, and they have changed their methods for distributing food, training employees how to keep their germs to themselves.

New cruise ship standards seem to be working. The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported this week that serious cases of gastrointestinal illnesses are falling. Federal ship regulators say cruise lines have become the model for fighting outbreaks of norovirus. Capt. Jaret Ames, head of the vessel sanitation program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, also credited cruise managers for sending extra medical and cleaning crews to ships with severe outbreaks, and for better informing arriving passengers about outbreaks and keeping them segregated from departing passengers.

Unlike nursing homes and hotels, cruise ships are required by law to disclose gastrointestinal illness regardless of cause. Overall, a small fraction of passengers are affected.

How to protect yourself

As I wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times, my guess is that while cruise employees pass on some germs, the primary problem is not the dirty ships but germy passengers. Most ships are cleaner than any other public places you will travel. Alas, the passengers are not.

Hand-sanitizers mostly protect passengers from each other.

The question is: Does rubbing a hand-sanitizing gel on your palms and fingers do a better job of saving you from norovirus than simply washing your hands? Probably not. At least that's the opinion of Carnival Cruise Lines, which does not use hand sanitizers but has a good record with a minimal amount of norovirus outbreaks.

"Strong evidence within the medical community suggests that the gel hand sanitizers don't work against norovirus," said Carnival spokeswoman Jennifer De La Cruz . "So what happens is that rather than washing their hands, people rely on the gel sanitizer, and it provides a false sense of security. We want people to wash their hands. Hand-washing is unquestionably, far and away, the best and most effective method for stemming the spread of norovirus."

What can you can do to protect yourself?

After you touch door handles, handrails, elevator buttons, other communal surfaces, and especially hand-shaking fellow passengers, don't touch your mouth or nose, or eat with your hands, until after you wash. And wash your hands often.

From the Mayo Clinic: Understanding germs.

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Molyneaux is editor of TravelMavens.net. CLICK for articles on cruising, Florida, Europe and adventure.