I took the MTA bus #444 (Palos Verdes) south on Hawthorne. It was after the rush so it wasn't crowded at all. At the Pacific Coast Highway I ran and caught the MTA #232 (Long Beach). This was an interesting ride as it went by the Los Angeles Harbor with it's forest of cranes and piles of cargo containers. The containers seemed to be piled everywhere. I enjoy seeing harbors as everything seems chaos to me but people are moving around purposefully doing something.

I also enjoy harbors, as well as dams and buildings and, even, oil refineries and oil fields, because I am always amazed at what people can do. We look so tiny in places like these but we are the ones running them. This also was true of the Queen Mary.

At Long Beach I took their little Passport bus, which is free to most of the tourist attractions, out to the Queen Mary. I think it's great that so many cities have the free shuttle buses around the downtown. Even if you have a car it cuts down on the hassles as you don't have to look for a parking place, and pay for it, everywhere you go. For me they are ideal as I don't have to figure out which bus to take. They are cute little red shuttle buses that seemed to be bustling around wherever I went.

The entrance to the Queen Mary is a touristy little group of shops and food places that was a bit out of place. The Queen Mary itself is great. It's been beautifully refurbished and is kept very nice looking.

I went on a guided tour of the places you can't get to on the regular entrance fee. This was an elegance that we just don't have anymore. Even the second and third class were tiny but had everything. Of course, I like small tiny places to live in. Everything looks a little dated now but still luxurious. It reminds you of the old ads with the lady looking willowy and elegant and the man dressed in evening clothes. There was art everywhere that fit into the decor beautifully.

There is even a swimming pool though it's no longer used as it isn't very structurally sound anymore. It's indoors, about 3 or four decks down, as the north Atlantic was not a place to swim outside anyway. It's all done up with tiles and a slide. They started with a diving board but it turned to to not be very practical as you would start your dive with 8 feet of water below you and, if the ship hit a wave, you could land in 3 feet. After a few cracked heads they had it removed.

They have walkways all through the enormous engine room. Everything is so big that you can't really comprehend it. On the way into the engine room there were some exhibits about the John Brown shipyards outside Glasgow Scotland. I was excited to see them as I knew my grandfather had apprenticed in the shipyards near Glasgow but I never actually knew much about them. I checked in the bookstore but they only had books relating to the Queen Mary and not just about the shipyards. Now that I have a name I can look them up. Not that my grandfather had anything to do with the Queen Mary as at that time he was in Australia and San Francisco.

I also toured a Russian submarine that's next door. It was smaller than I expected considering it had been in service up to the 90s. I got about 1/4 of the way through and then had to move fast as I was getting a little bit of a panic from my claustrophobia. It's a good thing that no one was in front of me. There is no way I could have spent much time on that thing.

Another exhibit at the Queen Mary were gifts that the Tsar Alexander of Russia had received while touring his empire at the end of the 19th century. There were wonderful things on display. This was when even subject kings were pretty powerful and presented the tsar with truly wonderful things. This was such a change from all the european art that you see so much in the "art of Russia" type of exhibits.

At the time the Russian nobility were more French than the French, but this exhibit showed the asian side of Russia which went from the Baltic Sea to Tibet, Mongolia and Siberia. The wall hangings alone were worth seeing. They were beautiful.

By this time it was late and I had gone through two rolls of film so I took the Passport back to the Long Beach transit center and the Torrance #3 bus to the Del Amo transit center and the Torrance #8 back to my son's place. I was bit bummed when I asked the driver how much with the transfer and he said "90 cents, oh, no, for you only 40 cents". Damn he gave me the senior rate without even checking ID, and I'm two years short of the 55 necessary. Not that I argued with him but it felt a little like when you stop getting carded when you are younger.