Regal Princess UK Cruise 2023

 Today on our final full day in Southampton before our cruise, we did a Titanic self guided walk which took us to the Engineers and Musicians Memorials. At the entrance to the park, we enjoyed a lengthy really pleasant conversation with a park maintenance worker.  He had all sorts of tips for us.  While searching for the memorials, we came across a memorial to Isaac Watts, famous theologian, preacher, and hymn writer.  We then found the permanent Titanic exhibit in the SeaCity museum.  This day there electronic payment system was down so cash only was accepted.  The Titanic was memorable to Southampton as it was the departure point for the Titanic's first and final voyage.  Much of the crew was from this area. There was also another permanent exhibition on the contributions of Southampton. We then caught a #12 bus (4£ Roundtrip) out to the local Costco where we enjoyed a Costco Dog and Gelato along with very pleasant conversations with locals and the C...

 On this first full day in Southampton, our plan was to do a number of self guided walking tours using an APP GPS MY CITY.  This is an APP I've used for many years to do walks in major cities all over the world.  There's a free version, but I elect to use the paid version which is available for a nominal annual fee. We chose to do three separate walks: Historical, City, and Waterfront.  I'll not describe them blow by blow but just comment that they were all really really good.  There is a short written commentary about each stop, so It's like having a guide along. We got to see a lot of history, much of the waterfront and a fabulous little airplane museum near the port (Solent Sky).  The major exhibition piece was a flying boat formerly owned by the American actress Maureen O'Hara.  There were also a number of other airplanes there including a Spitfire.  We watched all of their videos and totally enjoyed our visit there. We ended our tours with a ...

We began this most current trip by heading to the  SeaTac airport with a little help from our son, Ken.  We checked into Virgin Atlantic at 1:30pm for a 4:25pm flight.  Since we fly standby, we didn't get a seat assignment, we just headed out to the S-8 gate via the underground train.  There we found a charging station and waited for our seat assignment. About 45 minutes before the scheduled flight, we received our seat assignment and joined in group 5.  The plane was only about 50% full so there was lots of room to spread out and even sleep using the 4 center seats.  The plane was a 787-900 Dreamliner which is among my favorite long haul airplanes to fly.  We left the gate promptly at the scheduled time and became 2nd in line for departure behind an Amazon Prime 767.   Once in the air, we enabled the entertainment system and were served water or other choices of drinks and followed by a nice chicken dinner.  We watched OTTO (really good, but...