New Orleans/FL Trip (Day 35) - At Sea

Some of the 82nd group that brought pictures and scrapbooks from our Okinawa days decided to get together this morning and pass them around. Bob Hailey took the lead, and reserved a conference room on the ship for 10:00 am. Bob had converted a lot of old photographs into digital format and planned to show them on his computer. We brought several scrapbooks and Okinawa Wives Club magazines. It worked out really well as the room had a 60” flat screen TV and a rear screen LCD projector. All Bob had to do was plug in his computer and start a slide show of the photographs. We also set out our stuff on a table for people to look through.

Robb Hoover also had a CD with current photographs of Okinawa and Kadena AFB. One of the old 82nd crewmembers (Charlie McBride) had recently been to Okinawa to visit one of their children who is stationed there. We put the CD on the computer and were amazed how the island has changed. Little was recognizable to us as much of the island and the base has been developed and modernized. There were also pictures of Okuma, the military recreation area in the north end of the island, which seems not to have changed significantly. Almost everyone in the group came to the conference room and we all had a major dose of “déjà vu” .

General Urschler (Reggie) had written a letter to the ship's captain earlier in the cruise, requesting a special tour of the bridge and engineering sections for our group. The captain agreed, so we also had a tour of the bridge scheduled for 10:45 am this morning. We met the ship's Events Coordinator, went through individual security checks, toured the bridge and had a special briefing from one of the ship’s junior officers (one of the few Americans on the crew that we met). The tour was very interesting and focused on how the ship is run. It is essentially a high tech machine, run by computers with redundant back-up systems, and overseen by an experienced crew . The ship's systems are run by electric power fueled by huge state-of-the art diesel engines.

After the tour, we returned to the conference room for more 82nd reminiscences until we adjourned for lunch.

Dinner was a a low-key affair and almost everyone retired early to pack and get ready for our arrival at port in the morning. We got our bags into the hallway around 9:00 PM and went to bed.