Day 1: Leaving Baltimore

We left Saturday morning after a leisurely breakfast because I estimated that we had plenty of time to get to the ship by the deadline of 3:00 p.m. even if the traffic was terrible. As it turned out, traffic was light and I pulled into the dockyard just off Exit 55 in a bit over an hour, despite hewing to the right lane and driving a steady 55 mph to conserve gasoline, a sometimes dangerous tactic on I-95!

After parking right beside the ship (for a mere $91 for the week), we processed on board and set off to explore the ship a bit. The Majesty displaced only 40,896 tons despite carrying 1462 guests, so it was noticeably smaller than any other cruise ship we have sailed on except the 500-passenger "Astor" that we took around the coast of Italy on Wanderung 10. Having been built in 1992, it was also older than any other ship we had cruised on save for our very first voyage on the venerable Song of Norway back in 1991. Like the Song of Norway, the Majesty had teak-planked decks on the pool deck outside and wood furniture, bars, and trim inside. These touches were really typical of an earlier era in ocean travel, but they gave the ship a rather traditional, cozy ambience that I liked.

Unfortunately, the age of the ship also resulted in some disadvantages. There were only 6 small passenger elevators on the entire ship, and 2 of those were out of order for the entire cruise, leaving a total of 4 tiny elevators for almost 1500 passengers, which was quite minimal. Similarly, our 3-person "stateroom" was a narrow and rather cramped cabin with a kind of bunk bed on one side and a single bed on the other. Actually, the bunk beds consisted of a lower single bed and a pull-down berth on top similar to the pull down beds in the "couchette" cabins in old Pullman railroad cars. Monika and I opted for the bunks while Lois preferred the single bed, and I ultimately ended up using the upper bunk as it was easier for me to get into it and out of it than it was for anybody else.

The bathroom was also of the size you would have seen on the old Pullman cars, which is to say miniscule, but thank goodness everything worked. Our entire cabin had only a single 110-volt electrical outlet, so Monika and I had to take turns charging the batteries for our various electronic gadgets. The view out of our window had been described as "obstructed", and in fact an orange-colored lifeboat was hanging directly outside of our cabin. But I could look over it and see the horizon, so it wasn't as much a problem for me as it was for vertically-challenged (i.e., short) people like Monika. I created a bit more walking space in our cabin by shoving Lois's bed up against the far wall rather than having it smack dab in the middle of the room, and then we all unpacked while our ship departed Baltimore and started cruising down Chesapeake Bay to reach the Atlantic Ocean.

In the Baltimore harbor area the channel was still quite narrow; we could see the red and green buoys marking the channel pass by on either side of the ship. Navigating our way out of the harbor we passed some automobile transports, the "Comfort" hospital ship, and the usual smattering of recreational sailboats and powerboats as we edged down the channel. Up to the bridge for the southern part of the I-695 loop around Baltimore, we were shadowed by Police boats on either side that cruised along with their lights flashing. Apparently they were there to discourage any small craft from getting in our way; I saw one accelerate to head off on powerboat that had altered course to cross our bow. I thought they were just trying to regulate traffic and prevent any accidental collision with the large and somewhat ponderous cruise ship, but Monika thought that they might also be part of an anti-terrorism effort to forestall any attacks using small boats such as had happened to the USS Cole in the Middle East a few years back. In any case, the police boats veered off after we crossed under the bridge, and once past its graceful span the channel became appreciably wider and our ship speeded up a bit as we steamed down the bay.

We had dinner in the Seven Seas dining room in the stern as we glided along, and the set of about 10 windows at the periphery of the large dining room gave us a 180-degree view of the flat, forested shoreline receding gradually behind us. The food was excellent and the service exemplary, so we had a wonderful meal as we traversed the middle section of the bay including the unmistakable twin spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge near Annapolis, Maryland. After dinner we ambled about the ship a bit, finally finding a nice balcony on Deck 7 just above the bow where we had a fantastic panoramic view of the bay on every side of us. Several birds kept us company, including a pelican that dodged around and finally flew across the bow of the ship. Aside from the scenery, an additional benefit of our perch was a nice cooling headwind due in large measure to the fact that our ship had gradually picked speed up to somewhere between 10 and 15 knots. As we reached the mouth of the bay the sun was settling behind a bank of dark clouds off our starboard side, and when it finally became dark we retired to our cabin for the night.