I love a good boat. Olive boat, gravy boat, ship boat. I don’t care what sort of boat, a good one will always impress me.
And with such thoughts in mind I journeyed into the Quay this evening after work to see the Queen Elizabeth 2 and the Queen Mary 2. It was fun, in an arduous kind of way. It was busy when I arrived, which was about 15 minutes before the QE2 docked at the quay, and just got more crowded as the sun went down. Anyway, I arrived in time to walk from wynyard train station down to the Opera house, where I could see the QE2 arriving. As I, and everyone else, was taking photos, arms lifted over the crowd to get a clear shot, I noticed a man near by me taking photos on his phone. And guess what, his phone was the same as mine! So I stalked up behind him, and as he lifted his phone to take photos of the boat, I lifted my phone to take photos of his phone taking photos of the boat! I include them for you now.
What I love about these pics is that you can see the image he’s taking on his phone, which shows how great my hpone really is, for the resolution of the pics and the clarity of the screen. I heart my new phone.
So, apart from that, what was pretty good is they reverse parked the damn boat into the dock! It was most impressive. It made me wish I had tug boats to guide me when I go shopping and have to reverse park into a space in the car park.
In this pic you can see a tug boat nudging the boat’s arse into line with the dock.
And here you get a feeling for just how big the damn thing is, and it’s way close to the harbour bridge in this shot, although the perspective is a bit mucked up, cuz the boat actually fits under the bridge, but in this shot look taller than the road deck.
So there were people eveywhere, and rather than hang around the quay as more people disgorged from the available public transport, I hike over to Mrs Macs Chair to have a look-see at the Queen Mary 2.
I was duly impressed.
It totally dwarfs the finger wharf at Wooloomooloo. I had to actually walk away from the boat to fit it all in the shot, which I didn’t have to do for the QE2, even though I was much the same distance away. The QM2 is much bigger.
It’s a much prettier boat, although that’s mainly cuz it’s newer than the QE2. And its too big to hide the fact it looks a lot like a giant floating lego block. It makes you kinda which you had more to stack on top, but of course that would probably make it sink.
After that I made it back into the botanical gardens at 7.56pm, which was lucky cuz the park rangers were going to try and close the gates at 8pm. I don’t know if they were successful, but I’m glad I didn’t get caught in the crush of people that would have resulted from them trying.
As I walked about the quay I overheard snippets of conversation. My favourites were; "This is what it’s like at new years," followed by "It’s going to be worse at Mardi Gras." And an old woman complaining that "you’d think they’d park them next to each other so we could compare the size." Ha!