One of the tough parts about coming up to Swans Island used to be that you were out of touch with the rest of the world for however long you stayed there. For some, that was the whole point. For me, it was torture. I’m admittedly a bit of a slave to my Apple devices. It’s rare when I go anywhere without at least my iPhone. I probably check email 50 times a day, tweak my fantasy baseball roster and surf the web any chance I can get. These aren’t stats that I am proud of, but that’s just what I do. A couple of years ago Sara’s dad installed a wireless network for the house. We still don’t have a cable TV setup, but through the wonders of the internet and Apple TV, we can at least stay in touch with the goings on of the world if we choose too. Late Saturday night, all of that changed.

For a horrifying 72 hours we were without internet. A tear in the cable fiber left the ENTIRE island without an internet network, and us in the dark. It is embarrassing how upset this made me. We were left with nothing but the data plan on our iPhones, and at a house in the middle of the ocean, that means the dreaded “E” on your iPhone. The E stands for Edge, as in the Edge network. In layman’s terms it means good luck getting what you used to get instantly, in less than 15 minutes. It reduced me to hanging off the front balcony and doing the trick of holding my phone in the air as if that extra foot of lift would suddenly activate the LTE network.

In my former life that may have actually been a bit of an issue. Like most, my vacations from work were never truly vacations. Sadly it became expected that I would occasionally check and chime in on emails while away. These days, it was mostly just the shock of not being able to hop on Amazon and order the next item we forgot to bring up here in the first place. Or being delayed in “liking” something on Facebook. We had a few moving type of things to take care of, but nothing that couldn’t wait 72 hours it turned out. Perhaps the most stressful part of not having an internet connection, was that Sara couldn’t monitor Cam as he slept via our Dropcam. Even though he sleeps somewhere between 3-5 feet from our bed! He’s doing great by the way. His napping schedule has gone to hell since we got here. But we’re hoping he’s either growing, or he’s not loving his pack and play.

Sometime late Tuesday evening the fiber tear was repaired and our world returned to normal. We are left with memories of life when we couldn’t just check our phones instead of having an actual conversation at the dinner table (we did anyway). I almost slept a little better knowing that I couldn’t check the Orioles west coast score or my fantasy team from bed (I tried for close to 90 minutes late one night).

There are many things we take for granted in life. Hot meals, warm beds and our health. But I’d argue a fast internet connection is pretty close to the top of that list. For almost three days we lived like we turned back the clock almost ten years. And I didn’t like it one bit!