Busman’s holiday on QM2 for Carol

Two years after leaving Cunard to take charge of sister cruise line P&O, Carol Marlow has been back on board flagship Queen Mary 2, taking her mother on a week-long holiday to the Norwegian fjords.
But when you’ve been the president of the company there’s little opportunity to relax, and her successor, Peter Shanks, persuaded Carol to write a guest blog at WeAreCunard.com
In return, she and her mother received an invitation to dine with recently-appointed Commodore Christopher Rynd and his wife Julie, but not before she spent a rough day in the North Sea touring the ship and meeting lots of old friends among the crew.
She also watched the film The King’s Speech, and takes the opportunity to remind us that The Duke of Windsor – whose abdication brought George VI to the throne – was a frequent Cunard passenger together with Wallis Simpson in the 1930s and ’40s.
In Stavanger she took an excursion to the Flor and Fjoere gardens, while in Alesund she was intrigued to watch local youngsters skateboarding down a hill and into the waters of the harbour.
Her blog concludes before a visit to Bergen, and the ship was back in Southampton before the tragic events in Oslo and Utøya last Friday.