HER ENDLESS CRUISE PULLS IN TO DOCK

When the legendary Queen Elizabeth 2 docks for the last time this month after four decades in service, the crew on board will lose their jobs, but one woman will lose her home. Beatrice Muller has lived in a $7,000-a-month cabin on board the Cunard liner for the last nine years. The 89-year-old first fell in love with the luxury liner—which has played host to royalty, Nelson Mandela, George Harrison and Elizabeth Taylor—when she and her husband, Bob, started taking yearly cruises on it in the 1990s. She became a full-time resident after her husband died on board the ship in 1999. Muller says living there is better than a retirement home. She sold her New Jersey house after her husband’s death to live on the ship because she has no grandchildren and all her friends have either died or had moved from her old neighbourhood. The ship will soon be converted into a hotel in Dubai, but the prospect of homelessness doesn’t faze her. “I’ll keep on staying at sea,” says Muller, who is looking for another ship. “I don’t want to go back to housekeeping.”