In an earlier post I talked about “ship days.” Days that we are in a port but choose not to go ashore. This last couple of weeks has been intensive. As I write this leaving the Netherlands we have had four port days in a row and out of the last three weeks we have had 16 port days and only 5 sea days. Not only that but several of them have turned out to be pretty intensive port days. I won’t complain about getting older and slower, we are darn lucky we can still do these things at all but we are wearing out more quickly than even just a few years ago. Personally, I mark the slowing down to covid. Before I was hospitalized with covid I had more energy and stamina. After covid that diminished. All that led us to think that near the end of this three week string Suzi and i thought we needed to add a “ship day.”

But which port to skip? So, we worked a compromise. We decided to have a sort of shore day, sort of ship day and Cherbourg, France seemed the place to do it. First of all, when we arrived it was pouring rain and fairly cool, not conducive to wanting to traipse around an unfamiliar town. But Cherbourg provided the answer.

In Cherbourg the cruise terminal is one of those huge buildings left over from the “golden age” of transatlantic steamers. It had a wide pier with a terminal on the left and right and a train shed and railway station running down the middle. It is an Art Deco monument opened in 1933 and eventually called “Notre-Dame des Queens” Our Lady of the Queens because the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary called there. (The great SS Normande, and its later successor the SS France as well as the SS United States sailed from Le Havre).

The terminal has been re-branded as the “Cité de la Mer.” City of the Sea. It contains 5 different attractions, an Aquarium and ocean museum, a Submarine you can crawl through, a Titanic exhibit, A virtual reality crossing of the Atlantic (not for me, the only time I tried VR I got seasick, and I don’t get seasick on ships) and a museum of submersibles. It also has a restaurant and café. The terminal hosted an art exhibit by the French watercolor painter Marine Chatel, who was a delight to chat with and was thrilled that we taking some of her work home to Alaska “Send me a picture!”

So, as you can already tell, we compromised, we got off the ship, into the terminal, through the customs hall where the Queens’ passenger’s baggage was inspected, took a detour through the watercolors, and then across to Cité de la Mer. We didn’t need to put on raincoats, carry an Umbrella (Cherbourg is famous for its umbrellas) or wear a jacket. And when we got tired, we could pop back onto the ship.

That’s what we did. A little bit of art and a visit to one of the museums, the one with submersibles. It had an exhibit that surprised me. The Confederate Raider Alabama and the USS Kearsarge fought a naval battle in full view of Cherbourg. The Alabama was sunk. A joint French/U.S effort was made in recent years to find the wreck and retrieve artifacts. Some are on display here.

Of we had our coffee and some French pastries (of course, at the Café Richard, no less) and back to the ship, dry and not exhausted and having a restful day of only 5,667 steps.