‘The Seafarer’: A Christmas of Shadows and Spirits at Palm Beach Dramaworks

 

The anonymous epigram to this play, The Seafarer (c. 755 A.D.), truly sets the stage: it is our fate to be adrift, “wretched and anxious,” alone in an icy ocean of indifference, braving the vicissitudes of existence.   

 

Hence, I’ll make no bones about it: ‘The Seafarer’ by Conor McPherson may not appeal to everyone, particularly anyone seeking pure holiday cheer.  The play unfolds over a Dublin Christmas Eve, its mood reflected in the disheveled home shared by brothers Sharky and Richard.  Their artificial Christmas tree hints a deeper bleakness.  Both men are alcoholics, Sharky temporarily on the wagon, Richard blind and apparently making up for both of them with gusto.  Irish whiskey and potent Irish moonshine (poteen) are practically other characters in the play, fogging memory, judgment, and hope for anyone in their orbit.

 

The Palm Beach Dramaworks set is so striking upon entering the theater: every thread of the brothers’ lives is visible on its walls, family photos, Irish football memorabilia, and religious artifacts, all representing better past times.  Ironically, horseshoes hang at an entrance, in keeping with old Irish folklore meant to ward off evil. Anne Mundell’s scenic design works its magic before the play even begins, with a special shout-out to Jillian Feigenblat, PBD’s prop manager, and Celeste Parrendo, scenic artist.

 

‘The Seafarer’ is a play firmly within the tradition of modern Irish drama, a vein Palm Beach Dramaworks has tapped before: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Dancing at Lughnasa, Outside Mullingar, and The Cripple of Inishmaan.  PBD knows how to honor the dark humor, dashed hopes, and battered resilience that define this territory.  So while the play may not offer the familiar comforts of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ or ‘A Christmas Carol’, it has its own rewards for those willing to lean into the shadows.

 

True to the lineage Sean O’Casey carved out a century ago, McPherson gives us Dubliners on the edge, irresponsible, alcohol-fueled, clinging to camaraderie, wit, and bluster.  McPherson also adds something contemporary drama has embraced, a touch of magical realism.  Enter Mr. Lockhart; yes, the name is a hint, whose interest in Sharky is more infernal than social.  Offstage, Karen and Eileen, exasperated and long-suffering, exert their influence, two women who have clearly had it up to here with their men.

 

In the hands of director J. Barry Lewis and an extraordinary cast, these characters emerge with specificity rather than slipping into caricature.  Casting has long been one of Palm Beach Dramaworks’ strengths.  Resident Costume Designer Brian O’Keefe delivers masterful designs that reinforce each character’s distinct personality.

 

Declan Mooney, Sheffield Chastain, Rod Brogan, Michael Mellamphy, Rob Donohoe; Photo by Jason Nuttle

Declan Mooney is Sharky Harkin, our hapless protagonist, confronting the wreckage of his past while attempting sobriety, on a holiday of all times, and facing a reckoning that threatens nothing less than his soul.  Mooney brings a confident familiarity to the role, having served as understudy in the original Broadway production, directed by McPherson himself.  His portrayal of Sharky’s tragic flaws, a life marked by failure, generates more pity than hopefulness.  He is stoic at times, hyperventilating at others.

 

The always dependable and versatile Rob Donohoe is his blind brother Richard Harkin, hell-bent on gathering everyone for a drunken Christmas Eve card game.  Richard lost his sight in a dumpster-diving misadventure and now relies on, and demands, Sharky’s attention for his every whim.  Though often in a drunken stupor, he has learned to manipulate his younger brother through humorous guilt trips and accusations.

 

He is a central force in this production, around whom the other characters orbit, except, perhaps, Mr. Lockhart.  Richard even enlists his friends to go outside with him and his cane to chase away ne’er-do-wells, winos who are even more unruly than he and his companions, and whom Richard feels he can still intimidate.  Conveniently, this clears the stage for uninterrupted, more profound exchanges inside, but it also reveals something essential, Richard’s need to believe there exists at least one tier below him.

 

For further comic relief, look to their friend Ivan, who is another step-and-fetch-it for Richard.  Ivan is functionally blind himself, having misplaced his glasses after a night of heroic drinking.  Sheffield Chastain (PBD debut) plays a hilarious, hopeless, and endearing Ivan Curry, with a gift for physical comedy, stumbling through a myopic fog (which ultimately bears on the play’s resolution).  The playwright milks the missing glasses for all they’re worth, as Ivan literally “feels his way around.”  Yet all is not mirth: Ivan harbors “shameful secrets” known to Mr. Lockhart.  Chastain delivers one of the play’s most memorable lines with perfect timing and drunken profundity: “It’s Christmas for fuck’s sake!” the play’s version of “God bless us, everyone!”

 

Richard has also invited his friend Nicky, now partnered with Sharky’s ex-lover Eileen, to the card game, much to Sharky’s dismay.  Michael Mellamphy (PBD debut) plays Nicky Giblin with an unsettling undercurrent of feigned happiness and bravado.  His Versace jacket and driving Eileen’s car (really Sharky’s) represent high points in an otherwise diminished life.

 

With free-flowing poteen fueling tensions later in the play, conflict erupts in a flurry of swings and shoves.  In the aftermath, Mellamphy showcases his comic flair with a line delivered to Richard: “Sharky’s left hook is nothing compared to Eileen’s, I’ll tell you.”  Richard responds, “She wouldn’t hit you, Nicky.”  Mellamphy fires back with a humorous but revealing retort: “It’s the force of her words, Richard! Fucking pin you up against a wall.”

 

Nicky arrives accompanied by Mr. Lockhart, who believes he has come to collect what Sharky owes him.  Rod Brogan (PBD debut) is an elegant Mr. Lockhart who, as the evening wears on, conspicuously holds his drink, his composure sharply contrasting with the others’ inebriation.  Brogan’s actions and reactions are quietly demonic, often accompanied by a knowing smirk and a sense of omniscience.

 

The card game becomes the arena in which he intends to collect on a bet Sharky made twenty-five years earlier in a jail cell on another Christmas Eve, a promise of a rematch for his soul (apparently a busy time for Mr. Lockhart, resting until Good Friday for the past two thousand-plus years).

 

Declan Mooney, Michael Mellamphy, Rod Brogan, Rob Donahue, and Sheffield Chastain; Photo by Jason Nuttle

Brogan leans fully into the demonic nature of the role, delivering Lockhart’s long monologue with careful, menacing articulation.  On death (“you go over a cliff so silently and the dusk swallows you so completely, you don’t ever come back”), on eternity (“time is bigger and blacker and so much more boundless than you could ever have thought possible with your puny broken mind”), and on hell itself (a “permanent and crippling form of self-loathing” thousands of miles beneath an icy sea, in a coffin-like space).  Lockhart is entirely in his element with these proclamations, preying on self-destruction, turning a poker game into a battle for a soul.

 

The stage is thus set for discord and confrontation that yield McPherson’s themes: addiction, guilt, and the possibility of redemption, all rendered in rhythmic, darkly comic dialogue that captures the cadence of Irish speech.  The play is bleak, funny, and at times unexpectedly moving, a Christmas story for those who find the season more complicated than the usual carols might admit.  Perhaps that is why ‘The Seafarer,’ for all its shadows, feels oddly comforting, it understands the holiday more honestly than most.

 

This is a stunning ensemble production, a collective triumph, with Director J. Barry Lewis guiding both cast and creative team toward something more ambitious than a straightforward staging.  That is no small accomplishment, given the complexity of the themes, and at a time of year when mistletoe is generally preferred over existential angst.

 

Lighting design is by Genny Wynn, and sound design by Roger Arnold, whose omnipresent chilling wind, rising and falling, adds to the play’s otherworldliness.  David A. Hyland is the fight choreographer and Jennifer Burke the dialect coach.

 

We move inexorably toward the ending we expect, followed by a sudden deus ex machina, a Christmas gift of a double ending: an apparent redemption, or merely another chance to relive the same mistakes.  In a world defined by regret and missed chances, McPherson allows the play to close on something quieter and more human, a moment of grace among friends, and an unmistakable bond between brothers.  It is not salvation, exactly, but it is connection, and for these men, that may be miracle enough.

 

How Calm Becomes a Political Act

 

I’ve written a lot about politics in this space — usually zoomed in close, responding to the outrage du jour rather than stepping back for the big picture. I’ve long argued that political cartoonists have a rare gift for distilling truth into a single, clarifying image, such as this one by Barry Blitt of The New Yorker that captures the feeling of Thanksgiving this year. It’s ironic, then, that the most incisive political analysis I’ve come across recently comes from a former cartoonist turned writer: Tim Kreider’s new Substack essay, Sang Froid: The Case for Keeping One's Cool.

What sets it apart is not simply the macro-argument, what Trumpism is—how we’ve arrived here, and how democracies slide into authoritarianism—but its structure. Kreider frames the entire piece around a real event from his girlfriend’s youth: a terrifying encounter with a man she later in life recognized as the serial killer Israel Keyes. At seventeen, alone on a mountain trail, she survived by doing the counterintuitive thing: she stayed calm, engaged him directly, made eye contact, and refused to accept the victim role he was trying to impose. Her composure didn’t guarantee her safety, but it allowed her to navigate a situation in which panic would likely have been fatal.

 

That story becomes Kreider’s central analogy for our lethal national moment — when the danger is obvious to anyone who isn’t in denial, yet the rituals of normalcy compel us to behave as if things are merely “unprecedented” or “norm-breaking” rather than openly authoritarian.

 

This, I think, is the problem with the newly conciliatory Bill Maher, who now preaches a sort of kumbaya politics that feels more like a policy for “getting along” than one of resistance. For me, January 6 and everything that followed makes that approach unworkable.

Kreider would likely argue that this is also the problem with much of the traditional media: the persistent fantasy that “the system will hold” if only both sides show enough respect and tolerance. Where Kreider and Maher might actually agree is in their fear that the moment we drop the pretense of dialogue altogether, things could tip from a cold civil conflict into a hot one.

 

With that in mind, Kreider urges a different kind of resistance: to continue exhausting every legal and democratic tool available — courts, protests, boycotts, the defense of immigrants, insistence on due process, and protection of fair elections. The goal is not moral purity but tactical advantage: foul the authoritarian machinery from within the confines of legitimacy, buying time until circumstances shift. And when they do, the very Republicans who have bent the knee to Trump may ultimately turn on him the instant he becomes a liability.

 

In the end, what Kreider offers is a reminder that composure is a strategy that neither underestimates the danger nor romanticizes resistance. We only have to keep the machinery of democracy running long enough for the forces opposing it to exhaust themselves or turn on one another. And as his girlfriend’s story makes clear, survival sometimes depends less on bold, dramatic gestures than on the simple refusal to play the role the aggressor has written for you.

 

Full circle now, with Thanksgiving in mind. Fifteen years ago I marked the holiday with a photograph of my younger family and a warning about “increased polarization in this country.” That was during the Tea Party’s rise — a tremor we now recognize as the prelude to all that followed. So I’ll end as I did then, with something simple and still true:

 

To friends and family, near and far, Happy Thanksgiving — my favorite holiday, and a uniquely American one.

The Glide Path of Inequality

 

It was fifteen years ago that I wrote one of my first pieces on economic inequality in this country, and since then that inequality has soared on an exponential basis.

 

It is no longer the millionaire next door; it’s the billionaire—and now, with Elon Musk’s potential pay package, the trillionaire next door. That’s larger than most countries’ gross national product. That earlier piece was about a book I published years ago, Herbert Inhaber’s and Sidney Carroll’s How Rich Is Too Rich, and although its focus was on the inheritance tax (or lack of it), its ingenious first chapter vividly depicts the parabolic rise of wealth in our population in the form of a parade—each marcher’s size proportional to their income. Imagine what that parade would look like today.

 

Back then I pointed to the policies of the Tea Party. How quaint that Party now seems next to the present Republican Party of plutocrats, whose leader even held an extravagant Halloween Great Gatsby celebration at Moolah-Lago—as millions of Americans lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. It’s hard to accept that as “coincidence.” It is abject cruelty. Meanwhile, ICE roams the nation, snatching people of color it thinks may be illegal immigrants—under the guise that all such people are violent criminals, their families be damned. This is heartbreakingly captured by Mike Luckovich in a recent political cartoon in the Atlanta Constitution.

 

This especially hit home last Thursday. I was playing tennis, still recovering from my injury, and as I looked up to serve, I stopped: overhead was a low-flying C-17 Globemaster, a hulking military transport. Were we being invaded? Well, yes—in a sense. The tennis courts happen to sit on that particular plane’s low glide path into Palm Beach International Airport. And since it was Thursday morning, I knew what it meant: another weekend visit by our President, come to play golf and consort with the rich and famous and—with his steady stream of pardons for those who helped make J6 a reality or enriched themselves with crypto duplicity—the infamous as well. That transport carries “the Beast”—his armored car—as well as other security vehicles, devices, and, who knows, his favorite golf clubs.

 

We were once a country of compassion. Our tax laws have always been open to debate, but never before have they been so one-sided—or the government run so shamelessly as a personal plaything. It makes you wonder who will prevail at Sotheby’s impending auction of “America” AKA the Golden Toilet Bowl (Maurizio Cattelan, “America” --ca. 2016) reportedly being sold by billionaire Steve Cohen (also NY Mets owner). Perhaps it will be won by an absentee bid, destined for the Classified Documents bathroom. 

 

 

Palm Beach Dramaworks Finds the Man Behind the Martyr in ‘The Mountaintop’

 

Katori Hall’s ‘The Mountaintop’ begins not with history’s public moment but with its imagined private foremath—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alone in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel on the night before his assassination. Earlier that evening, he had delivered the now-prophetic “Mountaintop” speech at Mason Temple, speaking of a promised land he might never reach.

 

Hall has said the play was inspired by a story from her mother, Carrie Mae, who as a teenager longed to hear King that night but, at her own mother’s urging, stayed home “It would be the greatest regret of my mother’s life,” Hall recalled, adding that the fear and foreboding surrounding King’s final days became part of her “bloody heritage.”

 

From that personal history came a work that mingles the spiritual and the intimate. In Hall’s imagining, King’s solitude is interrupted by a motel maid named Camae—named for her mother—who compels him to confront his life and legacy, “warts and all.” He is no longer just an icon, but a man of humor, fear, and doubt, a human being vulnerable like the rest of us.

 

Hall infuses the play with passion and magical realism. Director Belinda (Be) Boyd makes the magical element feel organic, suspending disbelief as Camae’s true identity—as an angel guiding King toward another promised land—slowly emerges. When rose petals fall from heaven confirming her purpose, the effect is otherworldly yet utterly convincing in the hands of Boyd and her gifted creative team.

 

Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production stars Christopher Marquis Lindsay (in his PBD debut) as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rita Cole as Camae. Their chemistry commands the stage; both give performances that are inspired and deeply moving.

 

Lindsay’s portrayal captures a man on edge—pacing, restless, as much fixated on his missing Pall Mall cigarettes as he is tormented by the refrain, “America’s going to hell.” From the opening muttered parody of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee' (“My country who doles out constant misery”) to his vision of a multicultural America “banding together to shame this country,” Lindsay channels King’s anguish over what is—and his faith in what could be. His performance moves through the stages of grief until, bargaining exhausted, he accepts his fate with grace. The actor disappears into the man.

 

Cole nearly steals the show as Camae, the “new maid” who seems to know far too much. She listens lovingly as King speaks to his family on the phone, her eyes betraying both empathy and knowledge. Her line, “Nonsense comin’ out of a pretty woman’s mouth ain’t nonsense at all—it’s poetry,” feels like a credo for her performance.

 

She’s electrifying as she playfully dons King’s jacket, climbs on the bed, and delivers the militant speech she imagines he might give, King acknowledging “Maybe the voice of violence is the only voice white folks will listen to.… They hate so easily and we love too much.” What begins as a humorous oratory reveals a painful truth.

 

As Camae transforms from maid to angel, Cole’s intensity deepens. When King asks whether the future is “as beautiful as you,” her rueful and ironic “It’s as ugly as me” feels prophetic. He replies, “I wanna see it.” She warns, “It might break your heart.” That exchange leads to a stirring montage of images—courtesy of projection designer Adam J. Thompson—tracing the march of history since King’s death, much of it steeped in violence but culminating in images of our first black President.

 

Boyd directs with loving precision, orchestrating moments of laughter and tenderness amid tragedy. A pillow fight, a tickle fight—each moment of levity heightens the pathos that follows. The one-act, intermissionless play moves briskly, yet allows room for emotion and reflection. Lindsay and Cole, both consummate professionals, own the stage.

 

Nikolas Serrano’s scenic design captures the Lorraine Motel in painstaking realism—the neon sign glowing ominously through rain that turns to snow. Genny Wynn’s lighting and Roger Arnold’s sound accent the drama with lightning, thunder, and shifting tones. Brian O’Keefe’s costumes root us in 1968, right down to the holes in King’s socks.

 

If you are of a certain age, the assassinations of the 1960s remain seared in memory: John F. Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and two months later, Robert F. Kennedy. Those events are etched in our hearts as much as our history.

 

The hopeful ending of The Mountaintop feels hard-won—and, given today’s climate of anger and division, perhaps fragile. The violence and intolerance King sought to overcome still haunt our politics and our streets. The baton he passes in the play seems to fall from our grasp again and again. Yet as this production reminds us, we must keep reaching for it, believing—as King did—that the arc of history can still bend toward justice.

 

Palm Beach Dramaworks’ ‘The Mountaintop’ captures that fragile faith with beauty and power. Lindsay’s demeanor and voice become King’s at that final moment, transcendent and sonorous, feeling like he is reaching out through the fourth wall, urging us to continue the work he could not finish. It is another Palm Beach Dramaworks ‘must see’ production, a stunning beginning to the 2025/26 season.

 

All Photographs of Christopher Lindsay and Rita Cole by Curtis Brown Photography

 

 

The Emperor Remodels

 As usual, if you want the truth in one picture, turn to our political cartoonists. I’ve sandwiched this entry between cartoons by John Darkow and Mike Luckovich. Both depict the wanton violation of “The People’s House”—tearing down the East Wing to install a grand faux-gold ballroom to satisfy the faux golden boy president. I hear Nero fiddling away. Everything is now in flaming chaos.

 

One wonders when the people who voted for him will finally feel repulsed and deceived. Perhaps all they care about is his entertainment value. If Trump says his playthings are funded by donors, they take it at face value (ignoring the obvious “pay to play”) and cheer on his AI video showing him dumping excrement on the people they hate. His true followers are his enablers—the politicians, the judges, the cronies—all of whom have an open invitation to “The Rose Garden Club” (yes, that’s really its name), which now looks like the patio of Moolah Lago, complete with the new golden ballroom.

 

When SCOTUS declared him immune to just about anything, we all knew what was coming. His pardon of the J6 “tourists” was merely the tip of the iceberg. The ICE website—now under the direction of supreme sycophant Kristi Noem—is advertising a $50,000 sign-on bonus for uber-masculine men who can now legitimately roam our cities masked, seeking out the so-called "invaders" many of them despise. How many of these new ICE recruits are former J6 participants or Proud Boys?

 

And who is going to stop him? All the so-called “laws” that have reigned for decades are really built on good faith. So what if a court rules that he cannot tear down part of the White House without congressional approval—or that he cannot withhold congressionally authorized funds? There is no “police force” to enforce the courts’ decisions. Any other administration would back down once the court had spoken.

 

With all the ICE provocation taking place in American cities, it may be only a matter of time before the Insurrection Act is invoked. Will the military follow orders if asked to fire on protesters? Meanwhile, back in Washington, the demolition goes on and the plutocrats party.

 

More than a Drive to Asheville

  

It was a trip we’d long planned but, in retrospect, poorly thought out. That is the problem of being an octogenarian while your mind insists you’re half that age. I used to love jumping in the car and taking a road trip. This one was a week-long visit to our beloved Asheville, to see how it had fared after the destruction of Helene a year ago, and to visit our dear friend, Joyce. Unlike our dozen or so other stays—usually extended periods in a condo or rental home—this one was only four days, staying at a “hip” downtown hotel.

 

First, though, we stopped in Savannah for the night. Even though we could have driven straight to Asheville in one long day, a midway stop is always a welcome break. Unfortunately, a monster accident on I-95 shut down the highway for 12 hours, forcing us onto the Turnpike and adding another 100 miles and an hour and a half to our first leg. Still, at the unassuming Hampton Inn by the Savannah airport we were rewarded with a spectacular sunrise, which I hoped was a good omen for the rest of the trip.

 

We thought staying downtown Asheville would allow us to ditch the car and walk everywhere—forgetting that its topography is, well, mountainous. Not like our recent trip to NYC or, of course, where we live in “the Free State of Florida,” flatter than a pancake. Walking those hills and dragging our luggage through three destinations took its toll. I did all 1,500 miles of driving (Ann offered, but I foolishly declined) and most of the heavy lifting. Add in the strange hotel beds and my usual back problems, and soon I had what I thought was sciatica.

 

By the time we finished the last leg—twelve straight hours in inexplicably dense Sunday traffic and two major accidents—I arrived home nearly a cripple, the pain in my right leg and hip extreme. My primary care physician ordered X-rays, which only revealed my usual back issues. My spine compression issue apparently reached its tipping point.  I’ve been on medications and rest, unable to do my daily walk or play tennis. Depressing, but I’ll soon start physical therapy to try to break the cycle and get back on track.

 

Still, Asheville worked its magic. We love its laid-back ambiance and mountain beauty. It’s a little oasis in a sea of Christian fundamentalism—as the local TV stations and billboards in Georgia and the Western Carolinas make clear, reflecting deep conservatism and vehement pro-T***p sentiments. But Asheville is different. If you don’t have a tattoo, you’re obviously a visitor. I’ve said this before: it reminds me of my brief stay in NYC’s East Village in the 1960s, or often resembles parts of the once-bohemian, now-gentrified Upper West Side where we lived for years.

 

That first night we ate at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant, which had panoramic views of the town, with the Grove Park Inn in the distance, where we had stayed several times before.

 

One of Ann’s dearest friends, Joyce, now lives in Asheville. Though approaching 100, she just had a successful hip replacement and acts and looks thirty years younger. After our first full day, we had dinner with Joyce and her daughter Pattie at The Chestnut—one of Asheville’s many great restaurants.

 

As for the city itself, it has received only a fraction of the funds promised by FEMA after Helene’s devastation. Perhaps the administration sees it as punishment for the city’s politics. Revenge seems high on their list. Still, downtown was mostly spared, though there seemed to be fewer tourists.

 

Oddly enough, two of our main destinations were bookstores. At Malaprop’s, Asheville’s great independent shop, I found a special annotated edition of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, complete with her handwritten notes about the characters and themes—a treasure. 

 

Then a visit to the Asheville Public Library’s used bookstore, where we found a few gems for $1 each finally stowing them in the trunk of our car after that first day’s walk.

 

No trip to Asheville feels complete without lunch at the Pisgah Inn, some 5,000 feet above sea level at Milepost 408.6 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Although parts of the Parkway had been washed out by the storm, it has mostly reopened. After lunch, we drove in the other direction to the Folk Art Center, where we bought gifts for our hosts, Joe and Kyle, in Big Canoe, Georgia, where we would spend the last two days of our trip.

 

The following day we stayed downtown, particularly Pack Square with its quirky sculptures.

 

And, then, the Asheville Museum of Art which now occupies a relatively new building, and the first thing you see when entering is Wesley Clark’s My Big Black America (2015), an ingenious sculpture of salvaged wood stained and spray painted. I would like to still believe “E pluribus unum.”

 

The museum also gave us a hilarious moment. Just look at this photo:

 

It shows three sculptures—except one wasn’t. When Ann quietly went to sit on what she thought was an empty bench, she startled a young woman already sitting there (very still, looking like an artwork). Both jumped at the sudden appearance of the other!

 

After four wonderful days in Asheville, we drove 200 miles to Joe and Kyle’s vacation home in Big Canoe, about ninety minutes north of Atlanta. The community is filled with gorgeous mountain-style homes perched at different elevations around a large lake, with the requisite golf course, tennis courts, clubhouse, and marina. The weather was perfect, though by now walking was difficult for me. Still, we were treated to a relaxing pontoon boat ride around the lake, its quiet electric engine gliding us along.

 

But soon it was time to pack up and head home—a drive I dreaded, since we were determined not to stop for a hotel. Thankfully, Joe loaded the luggage (I couldn’t manage it) and even guided us out of the community’s winding roads. The last time I relied on GPS it led us to a false exit at the top of a mountain; it took 40 minutes to escape.

 

The drive home was simply awful. I made it in 10 hours last time, but this trip stretched to 12 thanks to traffic, frequent stops to stretch, and two Turnpike accidents. When that road narrows to two lanes, it becomes impassable. Welcome to Florida!

 

It was my intention to write about the unreal news events that unfolded during our trip, but there are so many that including them here would only complicate this entry. Better to save that for a follow-up – perhaps!