This was the sight greeting onlookers in Southampton yesterday - Celebrity Cruises' new ship Celebrity Equinox arriving in the port for the first time.
The ship will be staying here until July 31, allowing travel agents, consumers and the press to crawl all over it (not too literally I hope, although I'm sure there will be plenty of bubbly doing the rounds to celebrate the occasion) and get a taste for 2010, when sister ship Celebrity Eclipse, still under construction, will be based in Southampton and sailing for the British market.
On July 29, while still in Southampton, it will be named by Nina Barough, who founded the Walk the Walk breast cancer charity. Two days later it's off to the Norwegian fjords for its maiden cruise and then it'll be leaving the UK and taking up its summer residence in Civitavecchia, the port for Rome.
The ship cost £700 million to build, weighs 122,000 tons and carries 2,850 passengers, and has a half-acre lawn on top. I'm on board on Sunday and again for the naming next week and am looking forward to seeing whether the grass has greened up at all since my last visit, for the conveyance out of the shipyard and down the River Ems in Germany.
Jane Archer
