Tuesday, January 10th, 2023 At Sea Queen Mary 2

In the early hours of this morning QM2 exited the Atlantic Ocean and entered the English Channel for our final approach to Southampton where we expect to dock at around 4AM tomorrow morning. The news reached this morning that the Virgin rocket launch last night had been a failure, having suffered a technical problem during the startup of the second rocket booster engine. Following breakfast we started to pack in preparation for our transfer to the Queen Victoria tomorrow. The packing went remarkably well and we were complete in about 90 minutes; this was helped a bit by our strategic packing before we left home that meant we had several bags that were practically unopened during this crossing - perhaps a better description would be "slightly rummaged". We received a letter in or cabin a few days ago describing the transfer procedures for those of us going on to the world cruise on Queen Victoria. We've got luggage tags that need to be used on our bags that we will put out in the corridor tonight; these bags will be available to us in the terminal in the morning when we disembark. Our assigned disembarkation time is 10:10AM, we are to proceed to the terminal collect, our bags and change the tags to those for embarkation on to Queen Victoria - the bags will them be placed in a transfer container and we find our transfer bus which will depart around 10:30AM. We are hoping to be able to check in to QV, drop off our hand luggage and still have enough time for a couple of hour shopping in Southampton.