Wish you could’ve set sail on the Queen Mary? This ship is the closest thing.

Though it may have fictitiously gone full steam ahead in Arrested Development, the permanently-docked Queen Mary can’t leave its retirement home in Long Beach. But what if you could still approximate the experience of setting sail on the 1930s ocean liner?

It’s nearly 70 years younger, but the Queen Mary 2 might come closest to mimicking the experience of voyaging aboard the classic ship. Cunard Line, the storied British shipping and cruise company behind both vessels, launched its latest around-the-world cruise on the QM2 in mid-January (a staggering 108-night trip, with alternative options for shorter itineraries), and I climbed aboard while it was docked in San Pedro to partake in afternoon tea and gawk at its Art Deco–inspired spaces.

From the outside, the QM2 is aesthetically akin to its namesake—a black hull with white decks and a bold red funnel on top and stripe along the waterline—but with a bit more of a contemporary cruise ship contour. But this technically isn’t a cruise ship: The QM2 specifically bills itself as the world’s only active ocean liner. You’ll find most of the familiar leisure and luxury amenities that you’d have on a cruise ship, but ocean liners are built for speed and transatlantic crossings (including, in this case, semi-regular trips between New York City and Southampton in England); if you put the QM2 alongside other ships, you’ll notice its taller hull and longer bow.

On board, you’ll be hit with Art Deco details from the second you step inside the lobby, where a bronze, starburst-encircled relief of the ship sits above the grand staircase. The stage inside the Queens Room lounge mimics the shell of the Hollywood Bowl. Walk up to Illuminations, a planetarium-like theater, and you’ll be greeted by statues of Greco-Roman gods. And then there’s the showstopper, the Britannia Restaurant, a multi-story, thousand-person-capacity, atrium-inspired space that conjures a bygone age of travel, partially thanks to a handsome wall-sized tapestry of the ship set against the New York skyline. (It certainly channels the original Queen Mary’s former first-class dining room, which now hosts Sunday brunches.)

The ship first launched in the early aughts and underwent extensive renovations about a decade ago, with its next major round due next year. But I was pleasantly surprised by how it avoided the sort of gaudy and dated casino-like design you might find on other cruise ships; instead, everything I saw felt grandiose yet tasteful, with a visual identity that feels rooted in the 1930s but with enough contemporary sensibilities to keep it fresh.

Since my at-port tour was limited to just two hours (a couple-thousand short of that around-the-world voyage), I don’t know what it’s actually like to experience any of these amenities at sea. Though I never left the dock, I did, for the first time, get a hint of what it’s like to disembark a ship in L.A.—and, Angelenos, bear with me here, because I have some thoughts. As someone regularly writing about how to best experience a city that can be confounding and downright disappointing for first-time visitors, I couldn’t help but ponder how a port of call here makes for such a peculiar first encounter with L.A. As I watched daytrippers file off buses and back onto the two ships at port that day, I imagined them greeting the morning alongside container ships (or, if they’re lucky, some exquisite stretches of the San Pedro and Palos Verdes coastline) and then spending hours on the freeway to eventually see… the Hollywood Sign? Rodeo Drive? Or maybe they felt ambitious and hoofed across the sprawling parking lot to the barely-marked bus stop a block away for an hour-plus ride to Downtown L.A. In any case, could you get even a hint of what makes L.A. so special in a short afternoon? I’ve certainly been in these situations before on my small handful of port excursions and embarkations; for every Vancouver, where you pull up to a glistening terminal situated in the center of the city, there’s a Rome, where you’re actually arriving in an entirely separate municipality an hour away. Maybe Ports O’ Call replacement West Harbor will turn out so stellar that visitors won’t even want to stray from the harbor—but in all likelihood, this strange sojourn will persist.

As I started my own freeway journey back home, I was a little jealous that I wasn’t about to start a seafaring vacation—one that you can even waitlist your pets for, as the QM2 is one of the few ships with kennels. I’ll probably need to hit retirement age before I can even fathom setting aside the time for an around-the-world cruise (the QM2’s current voyage does feature other itineraries that range from 16 to 57 nights), but in the meantime, I felt fortunate to get just a taste of maritime escapism.