Sardinia, part 2

Five years ago, I couldn't have told you where Sardinia was, let alone why Europeans go all dreamy when they talk about it. Today I can say, definitively, that Sardinia is a big, hot-ass island off the coast of Italy, with beautiful beaches and an awful lot of German tourists.

Anette and Adinah and V. and I slept in a camper and cooked outside almost every night in a camping village by the sea. Adinah zipped in and out of the water like a flying fish and loved it, but V. never went all the way in--maybe something about the movement of the waves or the vastness of the ocean gives a 20-month-old kid the creeps. When we tried dipping her in the water, she just screamed. But she did have a lot of fun running around nekkid.

My favorite moment may have been wading into the waves with Adinah, turning away from her for a moment, then turning back to see her upside down in a small breaker, just two little crazy legs swirling around in a washing machine of surf. She was laughing when she came up and she instantly ran off to tell everyone else about it.

No. My favorite part was the routine: swimming twice a day, eating fresh salad and white peaches, actually reading after the kids had gone down in the evening, and then sleeping like a stone myself.

Wait, no. My really favorite thing was the Dr. Who pinball machine at the cantina, and the day I racked up the second-highest score ever, thus earning the title of both Best Time Lord and Loop Champion, and then put my name up in lights on the LED display of the machine!

Probably better than all of that was the fact that for almost ten days, I didn't think about my job, or e-mails, or the future of the publishing industry, or my phone, or the shitty weather in Vienna, or where we're going to be living in two years, or Barack Obama, or this blog. I, unplugged.