Monday, May 15, 2017 – At Sea – Atlantic Ocean – off the Florida Coast – Sunny – Warm – 80s

A beautiful day at sea...

After breakfast (the sour cream continues to come), I went to hear Louis Beres talk on “Israel’s Nuclear Strategy and U.S. Security” in the Galaxy Lounge.  A touchy subject and a talk I have heard before.

Ellen joined me at 11:00 AM for Jim Brochu’s talk on “Loving Lucy – The Life and Career of Lucille Ball”.  An interesting talk.

After lunch we decided to pass on all of the afternoon talks and instead go out on the back of Deck 8 and read.  I have given up on “Traces” for the time being (the hook took too long in coming) and started reading “Impact” by Lincoln Childs.  We stayed out there all afternoon and even ordered a beer.  Doesn’t get much better than that.

We changed for dinner and went to hear Rick Senat’s final talk on the history of Warner Brothers Studios. Rick picked up a cold or something and his voice is really raspy.  He did get through the talk but it ran over an hour.  I couldn’t stay for the end but people said he went past 6:15 PM.  Yikes.

Ellen Shooting Rick Senat

Zoltan, our "personal" Maitre D’ came through on our kosher dinner order .  Ellen had a wonderful looking veal chop and I had an all-American hamburger (with fries). The burger was really good and so were the fries.  We were running late so we passed on coffee and dessert and hustled to the theater.

Tonight’s headliner is Broadway Performer, Rachel York, star of “City of Angels”, “Les Miserables” and “Victor/Victoria”.  We’ve seen her around the ship so we were excited about seeing a more current Broadway performer. Her show consisted of several impressions of other singers (not bad for most of them).  She sang some standards as well including “Defying Gravity” and “I Dreamed a Dream”.  The best way to describe her is that she is a major belter. 

Instead of going up to the Palm Court, we went out on Deck 8 aft.  The back decks – smoking areas – have loungers.  The pads were gone but we found some in the wooden storage crates.  We also found a crate with clean towels.  We stayed out there reading and checking emails and Facebook until it was time to call it a day.  This was pretty much the nicest post show evening of the cruise.  We are going to do it again tomorrow night.