Today my friend Callie and I were both off and wanted to do something fun. We wanted to go see a taping of
Chelsea Lately, but Chelsea was playing hard to get. We emailed for standby tickets, but they didn't have anymore for today.
We then decided to drive to Long Beach and see the RMS
Queen Mary. You may have seen the ship in the Travel Channel for its hauntings. The
Queen Mary is a retired ocean liner that sailed primarily in the North Atlantic Ocean from 1936 to 1967. With the outbreak of World War II, she was converted into a troopship and ferried Allied soldiers for the duration of the war. Following the war the ship dominated the transatlantic passenger transportation market until the dawn of the jet age in the late 1950s. After several years of decreased profits,
Queen Mary was officially retired from service in 1967. She sailed to the port of Long Beach, where she remains permanently moored. Much of her machinery including her propellers and boilers were removed, and the ship now serves as a tourist attraction.
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| A super old picture of RMS Queen Mary |
We went on a ghost tour first, which was really a bunch of cheesy special effects with some stories about supernatural sightings on the boat. We then got to explore the rest of the ship our selves. They use some of the first class passenger rooms as a hotel now and a lot of the original features, like the on board library and dinning halls, have been turned into restaurants, conference rooms, and shops.
You could tell back in the day that this was a fancy ship. Now, due to the fact its old and renovations over the years have done more damage than preservation, it seems kind of odd and rundown. Over all though it was interesting to visit.
FUN FACT: The Walt Disney Company owned
Queen Mary from 1988 to about 1993. They bought it when they bought the company that owned the original Disneyland Hotel. They really didn't know to do with the old ship. At one point Disney was going to open a theme park around the
Queen in Long Beach called DisneySea at Port Disney, but their focus switched to Disney's California Adventure. The Port Disney concept they developed for Long Beach morphed into DisneySea at Tokyo Disney Resort.
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| Early concept art for Port Disney's DisneySea |
