Adventures of a City Boy

I'm in Maine on a combination vacation/filmmaking/high seas adventure trip. We started interviewing people for a short documentary about my favorite art historian's ancestors, who were pretty famous painters. Sure, forgetting the charger for the video camera was a problem, but our combination of east coast pluck and midwestern determination got us through (a trip to Portland to the Sony dealer helped too).

Today we went out in cousin Charlie's boat, and we were shipwrecked on a barren rock on the high seas! Er, well, the boat kept stalling, and then we were becalmed a few dozen feet off the island where we stopped for lunch; the ordeal lasted approximately fifteen minutes, but we had already worked out a plan to draw straws and eat the person unlucky enough to get the short straw, if the situation grew dire enough. (So I've been reading all of these books about shipwrecks and mutinies, and my imagination was working overdrive. And no, I didn't tell the other members of our stalwart crew about the emergency plan.) I even got a bit of a sunburn on the backs of my hands. All in all, a disaster narrowly averted.

Later tonight, it's off to the movies with MFAH's mother, then tomorrow we interview another relative and meet some people. Later in the week, we're going to the island of Monhegan for two nights, then back here for two nights, then it's off to New Haven for a few days before I return to Chicago. I might get a chance to blog again before I come back, but if you don't hear from me, know that I'm having a great time. (Or, suspect that we're all victims of a nautical disaster.)