Sylvia's Journal

Axel and I are indeed entirely off the grid because our mobile service provider is T-Mobile. The girls have Verizon and AT&T which does cover our neighborhood, even the boat to Monhegan Island. But I don’t mind. Being off the grid makes this the vacationest vacation I have had in years. I used my son-in-law’s iPhone hotspot to cancel my three phone calls this week that are part of my coaching program, and that made the vacation complete.

I am passing my time reading, knitting, teaching my grandson as many Dutch words as he can hold and checking out interesting places. One of those was the most wonderful Maine Botanical Gardens, the tiny State of Maine aquarium that is the size of our living room, and on Wednesday it was Monhegan Island. I only know about this island because of Rockwell Kent with his hauntingly beautiful pictures of this miniature Maine in the middle of the ocean.

On the boat to Monhegan Island I recognized J, who decades ago, was a colleague of mine at MSH. We had a lot to catch up with. She’d become an emergency room physician and then decided that rehabbing houses was more what she liked to so. During the 90 minute boat ride to the island I learned more about emergency medicine than from watching ER for years.

On the island we enjoyed the views visible between fogbanks, the history of this place, carefully preserved in the small museum with photos and artifacts; followed by a cold pint of dark ale at the new Monhegan Brewery, and a crab burger. We sat at the beach, sharing a table with an artist from Gloucester with her sherpa husband (sherpa because he carries all her equipment to pictoresque places). Artists go to Monhegan to paint and I can understand why, it makes you want to paint even if you can’t.

Tessa and Steve have left, sharing half our vacation and his entire allotment of days. They camped outside while the dogs slept inside, leaving the tenters a little more space. Faro is endlessly fascinated with what he calls puppiedogs. They like him when he drops food. Now it is just the four and a quarter of us.