Round two......

7:59 am - Friday - August 10th - Southwest Harbor, ME - 66º F, 86% humidity, wind 7 mph out of the west by northwest......sunny with a few clouds.  Rained yesterday evening, but it looks like a nice day today!

It was wonderful waking up on a Thursday morning knowing there would be no wood box to restock, no sites to clean, no effluent to gather, no smelly transfer station, no humid restroom cleaning, and no string trimming......just time spent with The Lovely Elaine.  It is soooo quiet in our new location.....very, very few cars drive by Tony's property, and the highway noise is nonexistent after 9 pm, and barely audible before that time.

Now to fill you in on the rest of what happened Wednesday.  As I wrote yesterday, the blog was brief as I was typing it on a small Cricket phone.....when your fingers are too large you find yourself hitting the wrong keys on that amazingly miniature keyboard.

The Cricket phone is a 'pay as you go' setup, and only costs us $25/month, so we'll probably keep it until we depart MDI.....BUT, we need a phone with a Hotspot so we can connect our regular Verizon phones to that and get internet, connect our laptop in order to type the daily blog, and to stream the occasional Netflix show. So, we drove back into Ellsworth Thursday afternoon for round two.........our goal: try and buy a Cricket phone which was compatible with the Hotspot feature, but quickly found they had none of those types of phones in stock at Walmart.......:-(....there is no local Cricket store......you have to go all the way to Bangor for that.....not in the cards, for sure.

We then drove over to U.S. Cellular which is the carrier which provides the best service in this area.  They specialize in servicing rural areas such as northeast Maine, and specifically MDI, and even more specifically, Southwest Harbor.  We found we could get a nice Samsung Galaxy S9 phone for free, unlimited data with a 22 gig limit on the Hotspot, and unlimited talk and text for about $60/month.  We have needed a second cell phone option as we travel around the U.S. in case our Verizon did not work in a given area.  So far, in 7 years this has been the first occasion where Verizon did not work.  If we find we cannot use the U.S. Cellular phone in places we travel to from here we can suspend coverage and billing for up to 6 months.....again, perfect!  We thoroughly enjoyed our experience with Kevin, and would highly recommend U.S. Cellular to anyone in a similar circumstance.

We had planned to stop at the local Goodwill to do some browsing, but just as we got back in the VW the skies opened up, and we had a genuine 'toad strangler' downpour.  We just decided to head back to Southwest Harbor instead of getting drenched.  The squall lasted about 15 minutes.....at times we had to slow to under 20 mph as the rain was so, so heavy......as we drove steadily south to the island it stopped with the rest of our drive being uneventful.

We were back home a little after 4 pm having finally solved our 'connection' problem.  I turned on the Samsung Galaxy S9, and then the Hotspot.....we were getting 3 bars of LTE (4G).  I turned on my laptop and the connection was lightning fast!  So, now we are set for our final month, or so here on MDI.  Life it back to normal and everything works as it should.

Around 6 pm I lit the Sea-B-Que so I could grill up some steak kabobs we bought in Ellsworth at Acadia Meats.  TLE supplied a side of fried rice with mixed vegetables.....our dinner was delightful!  We spent the evening watch recorded episodes of 'Masterchef', '24 Hours: To Hell and Back', and 'Chopped' and were off to dreamland by 10 pm......

.....oh, by the way, I bought this cool Acadia National Park t-shirt a while back.  Of all the dozens of t-shirts I looked at this one appealed to me.  What do you think?

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